Embryo Development

Embryo Development

Cells, Embryos, and Evolution : Toward a Cellular and Developmental Understanding of Phenotypic Variation and Evolutionary Adaptability
by John Gerhart, Marc W. Kirschner

Paperback - 656 pages (May 1997)
Blackwell Science Inc; ISBN: 0865425744 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.26 x 9.74 x 7.81

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Shaping Life : Genes, Embryos and Evolution
by John Maynard Smith

Hardcover - 65 pages (October 1999)
Yale Univ Pr; ISBN: 0300080220 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.42 x 7.33 x 4.81
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Fly Pushing : The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics
by Ralph J. Greenspan

Hardcover - 155 pages Spiral edition (March 1997)
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; ISBN: 0879694920 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.86 x 9.48 x 6.71

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The Shape of Life : Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form
by Rudolf A. Raff

Paperback - 520 pages (July 1996)
University of Chicago Press; ISBN: 0226702669 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.17 x 9.11 x 6.15
Other Editions: Hardcover
Book Description
Rudolf Raff is recognized as a pioneer in evolutionary developmental biology. In their 1983 book, Embryos, Genes, and Evolution, Raff and co-author Thomas Kaufman proposed a synthesis of developmental and evolutionary biology. In The Shape of Life, Raff analyzes the rise of this new experimental discipline and lays out new research questions, hypotheses, and approaches to guide its development.

Raff uses the evolution of animal body plans to exemplify the interplay between developmental mechanisms and evolutionary patterns. Animal body plans emerged half a billion years ago. Evolution within these body plans during this span of time has resulted in the tremendous diversity of living animal forms.

Raff argues for an integrated approach to the study of the intertwined roles of development and evolution involving phylogenetic, comparative, and functional biology. This new synthesis will interest not only scientists working in these areas, but also paleontologists, zoologists, morphologists, molecular biologists, and geneticists. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Master Control Genes in Development and Evolution : The Homeobox Story (Terry Lectures)
by Walter J. Gehring, Frank Ruddle

Hardcover - 296 pages (December 1998)
Yale Univ Pr; ISBN: 0300074093 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.00 x 9.53 x 6.48
Book Description
In this fascinating book, a world-renowned developmental biologist describes in vivid detail the landmark discovery of the homeobox, a characteristic DNA segment found in the genes of all higher organisms, from the fruit fly to humans. Walter J. Gehring offers exciting new insights into how genes control development as well as an engaging description of the art of scientific investigation.

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Sudden Origins : Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species
by Jeffrey H. Schwartz

Hardcover - 320 pages (April 1999)
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471329851 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.37 x 9.56 x 6.52
Other Editions: Paperback
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Despite the title, Darwin's Origin of Species doesn't really explain how new species are born. Scientists have been struggling with that thorny problem ever since its publication, and the recent revolution in molecular biology has turned up great piles of new evidence. Anthropologist Jeffrey H. Schwartz takes a close look at this evidence, as well as the more traditional paleontological material, in Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species. He claims that the tide is turning in favor of "punctuated equilibrium"--the theory that species typically remain static for great lengths of time and then experience brief spurts of accelerated change--thanks in no small part to the discovery of homeobox genes.

These remarkable structures are the genetic equivalent of the proverbial butterfly wings that cause hurricanes halfway around the world--small changes can produce enormous effects. Homeobox genes regulate development and are remarkable similar between species and even between phyla--you share some with fruit flies, for example. By turning our attention toward embryology and development, Schwartz shows us that fossils can't tell the whole story, since much of it lies within the womb. He covers a lot of ground and stretches the reader's intellectual muscles; the scope of Sudden Origins and the greater understanding of Darwin's problem make the challenge well worth it. --Rob Lightner

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On Growth and Form
By D'Arcy Wentworth Thomspson

Paperback - 1116 pages Complt edition (June 1992)
Dover Pubns; ISBN: 0486671356 ; Dimensions (in inches): 2.10 x 8.41 x 5.39
Other Editions: Paperback
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
First published in 1917, On Growth and Form was at once revolutionary and conservative. Scottish embryologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) grew up in the newly cast shadow of Darwinism, and he took issue with some of the orthodoxies of the day--not because they were necessarily wrong, he said, but because they violated the spirit of Occam's razor, in which simple explanations are preferable to complex ones. In the case of such subjects as the growth of eggs, skeletons, and crystals, Thompson cited mathematical authority: these were matters of "economy and transformation," and they could be explained by laws governing surface tension and the like. (He doubtless would have enjoyed the study of fractals, which came after his time.) In On Growth and Form, he examines such matters as the curve of frequency or bell curve (which explains variations in height among 10-year-old schoolboys, the florets of a daisy, the distribution of darts on a cork board, the thickness of stripes along a zebra's flanks, the shape of mountain ranges and sand dunes) and spirals (which turn up everywhere in nature you look: in the curve of a seashell, the swirl of water boiling in a saucepan, the sweep of faraway nebulae, the twist of a strand of DNA, the turns of the labyrinth in which the legendary Minotaur lived out its days). The result is an astonishingly varied book that repays skimming and close reading alike. English biologist Sir Peter Medawar called Thompson's tome "beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue." --Gregory McNamee

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Form and Transformation : Generative and Relational Principles in Biology
by Gerry Webster, Brian Goodwin

Hardcover (December 1996)
Cambridge Univ Pr (Short); ISBN: 052135451X
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection fails to explain the forms of organisms because it focuses on inheritance and survival, not on how organisms are generated. This book argues that biology needs a theory of biological form, and that this must be based on a generative theory of organisms as developing and transforming entities of a distinctive type (fields). A number of examples are presented and used to explain the logical relationships of biological forms that underlie biological classification schemes, based upon the properties of complex dynamic systems.

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The Art of Genes : How Organisms Make Themselves
by Enrico Coen

Hardcover - 384 pages (August 1999)
Oxford Univ Pr (Trade); ISBN: 0198503431 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.16 x 9.51 x 6.46
Other Editions: Paperback

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Epistasis and the Evolutionary Process
by Jason B. Wolf (Editor), Edmund D. Broie (Editor), Michael J. Wade (Editor)

Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Over the last two decades, research into epistasis has seen explosive growth and has moved the focus of research in evolutionary genetics from a traditional additive approach. We now know the effects of genes are rarely independent, and to reach a fuller understanding of the process of evolution we need to look at gene interactions as well as gene-environment interactions. This book is an overview of non-additive evolutionary genetics, integrating all work to date on all levels of evolutionary in
Hardcover (August 2000)
Oxford Univ Press; ISBN: 0195128060
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The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate : French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (Monographs on the History and Philosophy of Biology)
by Toby A. Appel

Hardcover - 305 pages (March 1987)
Oxford Univ Press; ISBN: 0195041380 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.86 x 9.60 x 6.36

Editorial Reviews
Book Description
For scientists, no event better represents the contest between form and function as the chief organizing principle of life as the debate between Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This book presents the first comprehensive study of the celebrated French scientific controversy that focused the attention of naturalists in the first decades of the nineteenth century on the conflicting claims of teleology, morphology, and evolution, which ultimately contributed to the making of Darwin's theory. This history describes not only the scientific dimensions of the controversy and its impact on individuals and institutions, but also examines the meaning of the debate for culture and society in the years before Darwin.

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The Making of a Fly : The Genetics of Animal Design
by Peter A. Lawrence

Paperback - 228 pages (January 1992)
Blackwell Science Inc; ISBN: 0632030488 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.68 x 9.64 x 7.44

Editorial Reviews
Synopsis
In The Making of a Fly, one of the world's foremost authorities guides readers through the developmental process of the fruit fly, drosophila melanogaster. (This fly proves to be the almost perfect organism for the combined study of embryology and genetics.) This first comprehensive treatment of animal design and construction presents the exciting story of new molecular techniques used by imaginative scientists. Black-and-white photos and line drawings.

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From the Back Cover
Designed to help readers learn how to think like evolutionary biologists, this 4-color book approaches evolutionary biology as a dynamic field of inquiry and as a process. Using a theme-based approach, it illustrates the interplay between theory, observation, testing and interpretation. It offers commentary on strengths and weaknesses of data sets, gives detailed examples rather than a broad synoptic approach, includes many data graphics and boxes regarding both sides of controversies. Introduces each major organizing theme in evolution through a question--e.g., How has HIV become drug resistant? Why did the dinosaurs, after dominating the land vertebrates for 150 million years, suddenly go extinct? Are humans more closely related to gorillas or to chimpanzees? Focuses on many applied, reader-relevant topics--e.g., evolution and human health, the evolution of senescence, sexual selection, social behavior, eugenics, and biodiversity and conservation. Then develops the strategies that evolutionary biologists use for finding an answers to such questions. Then considers the observations and experiments that test the predictions made by competing hypotheses, and discusses how the data are interpreted. For anyone interested in human evolution, including those working in human and animal health care, environmental management and conservation, primary and secondary education, science journalism, and biological and medical research.
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