| Description |
255 pages ; 22 cm |
| Contents |
1. Hand luggage only -- 2. The biased Buddhist -- 3. Sandcastles and their children -- 4. A deafening silence -- 5. Cork prisons -- 6. Building a castle of cells -- 7. Dances with genes -- 8. Life through time -- 9. The embryo wars -- 10. Darwin and his legacy -- 11. Possible creatures, probable creatures -- 12. Duplicate and diversify -- 13. The best box of all -- 14. From simple to complex -- 15. From complex to even more complex -- 16. Acquiring your head -- 17. Crossing the threshold -- 18. Dinosaur blues -- 19. Beyond Pluto -- 20. Big questions |
| Summary |
"In Creatures of Accident, an internationally renowned expert on the new science of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo, for short) addresses the most important unanswered question in evolutionary theory today: How do complex, advanced creatures arise from simple, primitive ones? This "vertical" dimension of evolution has been downplayed in both the specialist and the popular literature on evolution, in large part because in the past it was associated with unsavory political views. The avoidance of evolution's vertical dimension has, however, left evolutionary biology open to the perception, from the outside, that it deals merely with the diversification of rather similar creatures, all at the same level of "advancedness" from a common ancestor - for example, as in the classic case studies of finches with different beaks or moths of different color."--BOOK JACKET |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Natural selection.
|
|
Evolution (Biology)
|
|
Mutation (Biology)
|
| LC no. |
2005033540 |
| ISBN |
9780809043217 hardcover alkaline paper |
|
0809043211 hardcover alkaline paper |
|
