Jones has stated creationists, including the then US Vice President Mike Pence do not know what Charles Darwin's ideas actually were and that his intention in the book is to reveal the bare bones of this theory. Jones, who has stated that Ladybird books were not a feature of his childhood in Welsh speaking Aberystwyth, says that he is using the book, which is for both schoolchildren and grown-ups, as the textbook for his first-year evolution course at University College London. "The Guardian"'s associate culture editor Claire Armistead points to the final picture of the book's Guardian-reading author being hoisted aloft by an extremely well-endowed chimp as and example of the series' sly tongue-in-cheek humour. Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights' founder Nic Bottomley stated that the books in this series were very different from previous retro-books for adults and that they looked like great access points to complex subjects from some brilliant writers. Ravensbourne University London's dean of design Prof. Lawrence Zeegen criticized the quality of the illustrations, stating that while a reasonable attempt at replicating the originals, they were not as good as those that were produced for the original series by artists working in an idiom that was, at the time, modern. He concludes that the use of the no longer contemporary style feels patronizing in a way the original books never did.