Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom.ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom SEAN B. CARROLL Sean B. Carroll is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies the evolution of cis-regulation in the context of biological development, using Drosophila as a model system. This book is an introduction to evo devo, or evolutionary developmental biology Evolutionary developmental biology (evolution of development or informally, evo-devo) is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different animals and plants in an attempt to determine the ancestral relationship between organisms and how . Author Carroll is at the forefront of this emerging field as a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison “University of Wisconsin” redirects here. For other uses, see University of Wisconsin (disambiguation). A public, land-grant institution, UW-Madison offers a wide spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs, and student activities. . He declares evo devo to be the third revolution in modern biological thought, after Darwinian evolution and molecular biology molecular biology, scientific study of the molecular basis of life processes, including cellular respiration, excretion, and reproduction. The term molecular biology was coined in 1938 by Warren Weaver, then director of the natural sciences program at the Rockefeller . Evo devo has already revealed that even wildly dissimilar animals have nearly identical genetic makeups. For instance, people's arms, lobsters' claws, and fish's fins all develop from similar "tool kits" of genes, Carroll explains. Genes that resemble each other even control what seem to be more-refined evolutionary differences among creatures, such as a butterfly's wing spots, a zebra's stripes, or a person's hair color. What refines the genes' effects is where they act in various animals' bodies and at what stage of development they have influence. This is one of the first books attempting to explain evo devo to a general audience. The author's ability to make complex ideas understandable makes the book a must-read for anyone interested in genetics and the ongoing debate over evolution versus creationism creationism or creation science, belief in the biblical account of the creation of the world as described in Genesis, a characteristic especially of fundamentalist Protestantism (see fundamentalism). . W. W. Norton & Company, 2005, 350 p., color photos and illus., hardcover, $25.95. |
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