  "Evidence and Evolution: the Logic behind the Science" was published in 2008
by Elliott Sober. It examines the philosophical foundations of the statistical
arguments used to evaluate hypotheses in evolutionary biology, based on simple
examples and likelihood ratios. The difficulty with reading the book from a
statistician's perspective is the reluctance of the author to engage into model
building and even less into parameter estimation. The first chapter nonetheless
constitutes a splendid coverage of the most common statistical approaches to
testing and model comparison, even though the advocation of the Akaike
information criterion against Bayesian alternatives is rather forceful. The
book also covers an examination of the "intelligent design" arguments against
the Darwinian evolution theory, predictably if unnecessarily resorting to
Popperian arguments to correctly argue that the creationist perspective fails
to predict anything. The following chapters cover the more relevant issues of
assessing selection versus drift and of testing for the presence of a common
ancestor. While remaining a philosophy treatise, Evidence and Evolution is
written in a way that is accessible to laymen, if rather unusual from a
statistician viewpoint, and the insight about testing issues gained from
Evidence and Evolution makes it a worthwhile read.
