Gregory Chaitin 2013. Proving Darwin. Making biology mathematical New York: Random House, 123 pp.

Gregory Chaitin is a mathematician with substantial publications, especially on Gödel and Turing but I was disappointed by the lack of substance in this attempt to provide a mathematical basis to Darwinian evolution. After wading through a kind of reading diary on evolution and mathematics Chaitin produced his “toy model” (his own words): a mathematical organism that evolves by increasing a (single ) “fitness” variable through an “algorithmic mutation”. No real world evolutionary phenomenon is included (decrease in fitness; fitness as a result of interaction with other organisms or the environment, only 1 dimension to fitness just for starters. Despite my initial high hopes on encountering this book, Gregory Chaitin hasn’t engaged with evolution at all, nor with me.