Not all of the writing in the book is as bad as the puppy passage, but most of it is childish and dull. The great, unifying principle of biology is that all organisms, past and present, share an evolutionary history and are related by descent. The idea proposed by Charles Darwin that organisms have changed gradually over a long period of time. Darwin believed that helpful variations developed by chance, but that individuals with these variations were then more likely to survive to bear young and thus pass on the variation. That is false and grossly misleading.
Natural selection is one concept that explains the change.
And it is evolution, not natural selection, that unites all of today's biology. Addison-Wesley's writers misrepresent and confuse two different things, and they fail to acknowledge evolution in its own right. Most conspicuously, the writers again cast evolution as the idea of one man, Darwin, who died more than a century ago. They say nothing about the modern status of evolutionary biology. There is no discussion of homologous structures in the vertebrates, nothing about the overwhelming biochemical evidence that all living things share a common ancestor, and not a single word about human ancestry.