Julian Huxley's 1942 book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis is an historically important book which remains well worth reading. In this review I focus on Huxley's debt to Richard Goldschmidt and Cyril Darlington. I discuss the conceptions of the genome developed by Goldschmidt and Darlington and their continuing relevance.Keywords Evolution . Genome . Julian Huxley Science, philosophers and sociologists of science often tell us, is inherently an ahistorical enterprise, with scientists at most dealing with Whiggish history and hero-worship. If this is the case, one has to be suspicious whenever a science book of historical significance is reissued. It is not hard to explain the flurry of editions of Darwin's famous texts, republished to coincide with the Darwin bicentennial and the sesquicentenary of On the Origin of Species. The republication of books by less iconic figures urges us to ask Why this book? Why now? Julian Huxley's 1942 classic Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (ETMS), recently reissued by MIT Press, is rich in biological examples and evolutionary argument, and is of enough historical significance, to merit republication and discussion.1942 saw the publication of two books that came to represent the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary thought, which was the guiding framework for evolutionary biology for most of the twentieth century: Ernst Mayr's Systematics and the origin of species, from the viewpoint of a zoologist and Julian Huxley's Evolution: The modern synthesis, which gave the evolutionary synthesis its name. Both books are milestones in the history of evolutionary thought. The two books however are very different.Huxley's book, sometimes described as ponderous and, remarkably from a contemporary perspective, also described as a popular account, is more massive than Mayr's shorter book, spanning close to 800 pages in the edition under review.