This book is about the extent to which these fears are justified, and it dealswith topics that are familiar subjects of anxiety: free will and responsibility, thepossibilities for change and improvement, ethics, altruism, and personal andpolitical ideals and aspirations. It approaches the matter, however, not by joiningin the battles about the extent to which our origins and nature can be under-stood in Darwinian terms, but by taking on the more fundamental – andrelatively neglected – question of how much is really at stake in these battles. Itspurpose is to work out the extent to which the more radical forms of Darwinismreally do have the alarming implications they are alleged to have. Differentproblems appear in different places, but the overall conclusion is that for avariety of reasons – many connected with an insufficient appreciation of howradical Darwinian thinking is, and a failure to recognize philosophical problemsfor what they are – much less turns on the outcome of the battles than oftenseems to be assumed