Principles of Evolution: Systems, Species, and the History of Life

Description

Principles of Evolution covers all aspects of the subject. Following an introductory section that provides necessary background, it has chapters on the evidence for evolution that cover the fossil record, DNA-sequence homologies, and protein homologies (evo-devo). It also includes a full history of life from the first universal common ancestor, through the rise of the eukaryote and on to the major groups of phyla. This section is followed by one on the mechanism of evolution with chapters on variation, selection and speciation. The main part of the book ends with a chapter on human evolution and this is followed by appendices that expand on the making of fossils, the history of the subject and creationism. What marks this book as different from others on evolution is its systems-biology perspective. This new area focuses on the role of protein networks and on multi-level complexity, and is used in three contexts. First, most biological activity is driven by such networks and this has direct implications for understanding evo-devo and for seeing how variation is initiated, mainly during embryogenesis. Second, it provides the natural language for discussing phylogenetics. Third, evolutionary change involves events at levels ranging from the genome to the ecosystem and systems biology provides a context for integrating material of this complexity. The book assumes a basic grounding in biology but little mathematics as the difficult subject of evolutionary population genetics is mainly covered qualitatively, with major results being discussed and used rather than derived. Principles of Evolution will be an interesting and thought-provoking text for undergraduates and graduates across the biological sciences.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Principles of Evolution: Systems, Species, and the History of Life

  • 2016-09-12
  • 392 pages
  • Ebook
  • Garland Science

Similar books

• 

  The Science of Evolution: Systems, Species, and the History of Life

  By Jonathan Bard

  The solution adopted here is to make the science of evolution the primary focus of the book and place the various parts of the history of life in the context of the research that unpicks it.

• 

  Principles of Social Evolution

  By Andrew F.G. Bourke

  Investigates and sets out the common principles of social evolution operating across all taxa and levels of biological organisation.

• 

  Epigenetic Principles of Evolution

  By Nelson Çabej

  This is the first and only book, so far, to deal with the causal basis of evolution from an epigenetic view.

• 

  Evolution: Principles and Processes

  By Hall, Brian K. Hall

  Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images or content found in the physical edition.

• 

  Principles of Evolutionary Medicine

  By Alan Beedle, Tatjana Buklijas, Felicia Low

  A new updated edition of the first integrated and comprehensive textbook to explain the principles of evolutionary biology from a medical perspective and to focus on how medicine and public health might utilise evolutionary biology.

• 

  The First Principles of Evolution

  By HardPress, Herbert S 1874

  Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there...

• 

  Principles of Brain Evolution

  By Georg F. Striedter

  This book is a detailed examination of these principles, using data from a wide array of vertebrates but minimizing technical details and terminology.

• 

  Principles of Human Evolution

  By Robert Andrew Foley, Roger Lewin

  New York: Simon and Schuster. 360 Keeley, L. H. 1980. Experimental Determination of Stone Tool-Use: A Microwear Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 361 Isaac, G. 1978. Food sharing and human evolution: archaeological ...

• 

  Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution

  By Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Thorbjørn Knudsen

  A theoretical study dealing chiefly with matters of definition and clarification of terms and concepts involved in using Darwinian notions to model social phenomena.

• 

  The Theory of Evolution: Principles, Concepts, and Assumptions

  By David P. Mindell, Samuel M. Scheiner

  This book gives us that framework and synthesis for the twenty-first century.