A list of some of the people and ideas I expected to find would include R.A. Fisher, who developed the classic mathematical treatment of evolution; George Williams, whose 1966 book, Adaptation and Natural Selection, is the bible of modern evolutionary theorists; William Hamilton, who showed how seemingly altruistic behavior could arise from "selfish" natural selection (an idea made famous by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene); and John Maynard Smith, who revolutionized the study of evolution a generation ago by introducing game theory to the subject. Also, since bionomics is about the "economy as ecosystem," and Rothschild loves to expound on the diversity of both ecosystems and economies, I would have expected at least some discussion of MacArthur and Wilson's "equilibrium theory" of species diversity, which turned the study of diversity from a descriptive to a predictive science and is the central theme of David Quammen's recent book, The Song of the Dodo. None of these people or ideas is in Bionomics; indeed, it is obvious from the book that its author had not even read Dawkins' popularizations.