Book Review of Chance in Evolution

Ever since the eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel over a century-and-a-half ago dismissed Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection as "the law of higglety-pigglety," the role of chance in Darwin's theory and in evolution itself has been controversial. Arguably even more than natural selection, it is the chance element in Darwin's theory that distinguishes it from previous evolutionary theories and that leads a substantial percentage of Americans to reject it. It also turns out to be an especially vexed conceptual issue for biologists and philosophers trying to understand the processes and products of evolution. But what, precisely, is "chance" within the context of evolutionary biology, and what forms does it take in evolutionary processes?