In Search of Deep Time
Subtitle: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life
Publisher: Free Press
Published: December 15, 1999
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780684854212
Subjects: Science/Mathematics; Paleontology (General); Science; Statistical methods; General; Life Sciences - Evolution; Palaeontology; Science / General; Paleontology; Cladistic analysis
First sentence: I CLIMB TO THE TOP OF THE RIDGE to get a better look at the view.
Description: "Henry Gee, Chief Science Writer at Nature, tells the story of a recent revolution in palaeontology. For the first time, all of us can share in the wonder of a deceptively simple idea known as cladistics, the science of comparison. The cladistics revolution is transforming almost everything we know about the science of life in Deep Time - the billions of years in which life has evolved on this planet.

It provides insights and solutions to questions about ourselves ordinarily considered beyond the realm of science."--BOOK JACKET.

"The real answers to how life evolved and how life forms are related come from cladistic analysis, from measuring the tremendous variety of genetic and anatomic variations between species and juggling them with computer technology. Because of cladistics, scientists have come to believe that hippos are more closely related to whales than pigs.

We have learned that the old way of understanding nature, in which we squashed the teeming variety of life on earth into our own haphazard and arbitrary categories, must be replaced by understanding precisely how similar, and how different, each species measurably is."--BOOK JACKET.