While rejecting the arguments of creationists, and accepting evolution, Hitchings purports to show that Darwin's theory of the engine of evolution, Natural Selection, is wrong.

The author comprehensively covers the range of views of the evidence across fields of morphology, population genetics, paleolithics and biology, as well as chemical and mathematical/statistical modeling. He names, and seems to have interviewed, most of the distinguished names in the field. His reading of Darwin himself is particularly careful and sympathetic. This work is of historical importance, because of the interviews.

Still, I doubt Hitching did actually "read" Darwin's proofs, starting with the very first sentence of "Origin". Like many believers, Hitching does not refute the submitted facts, and misses the point of "intermediate" forms and the massive extinctions in the Pre and Cambrian periods. ( )