Henry Gee is a senior editor at Nature. He is the author of Before the Backbone: Views on the Origin of the Vertebrates and In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Fossils and genes dominate this hefty and valuable collection of 19 life-sciences papers, all originally published in the prestigious science journal Nature. Senior editor Gee (In Search of Deep Time) outlines the collection's rationale in a lucid introduction: over the past 10 years or so, new lab technology has connected with new ideas to revitalize the study of evolution, growth and inheritance, from chromosomes to populations. "Evo-devo," or evolutionary developmental biology, explores the large-scale divergences, low down on evolution's branching trees, that separate roundworms from flatworms and lobsters from larks; cladistics improves our guesses about the shape of those trees by studying in mathematical terms the relatedness of present species' DNA. But the collection begins with neither method: in its first paper, Stephen Jay Gould (Rocks of Ages) and collaborator Niles Eldredge revisit and defend their famous theory of "punctuated equilibrium." In the next selections, renowned U.K. biologist John Maynard Smith and E”rs Szathm ry consider the chemical basis of major events in early and intracellular evolution, and Caro-Beth Stewart discusses the "powers and pitfalls" of a scheme of thought used in cladistics. The rest of the papers take on broad issues in evolution and earth history; the emergence of various phyla, orders and families from ferns to finches; and primate history and evolution. These are not popularizations, but scientific papers of potentially broad interest, and readers with a serious background in biology--Scientific American subscribers, say--will find in this collection sustained pleasure and interest. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
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