In the light of evolution
Subtitle: essays from the laboratory and the field
By: edited by Jonathan Losos
Publisher: Roberts
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Greenwood Village, Colo.
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9780981519494
Description: In the Light of Evolution is a collection of essays by leading scientists, and includes essays by science writer Carl Zimmer, historian Janet Browne, and a foreword by journalist David Quammen. As Quammen says in his foreword, the book collects "reports from the field, plainspoken descriptions of lifetime obsessions, hard-earned bits of wisdom, and works in progress, pried loose from some of the most interesting, eminent researchers in evolutionary biology ..." It is a book "for readers who are fascinated by evolutionary biology and who desire to understand better the day-by-day, species-by-species, ecosystem-by-ecosystem texture of its practice as a scientific profession." The book is intended for anyone with an interest in evolution, and it can be used in a wide variety of courses, including major's and non-major's introductory biology and evolution classes. - Publisher.
Table of contents: title: Foreword / David Quammen; title: Charles Darwin : traveller, author, and naturalist / Janet Browne; title: Darwin in the pupkin patch or Bay Area travels with Charlie / James Curtsinger; title: Darwin under the microscope : witnessing evolution in microbes / Carl Zimmer; title: Four legs good, two legs fortuitous : brains, brawn, and the evolution of human bipedalism / Daniel E. Lieberman; title: Detective work in the West Indies : integrating historical and experimental approaches to study the evolutionary diversification of island lizards / Jonathan B. Losos; title: Patterns, process, and the parable of the coffeepot incident : arms races between newts and snakes from landscapes to molecules / Edmund D. Brodie III; title: The herbivore's dilemma : never enough nitrogen / Naomi E. Pierce and Andrew Berry; title: My island life / Luke Harmon; title: Diversity in the weapons of sexual selection : horn evolution in dung beetles / Douglas Emlen; title: Sex, society, and peacock tails : sexual selection from Darwin to modern times / Marlene Zuk and Teri J. Orr; title: Sexual selection : a tutorial from the Túngara frog / Michael J. Ryan; title: Guppies and the empirical study of adaptation / David Reznick; title: O Sting, where is thy death? The evolution of altruism / David Queller; title: King Midas and his many extremely young species : studies on speciation in Crater Lake cichlid fishes in Nicaraguan crater lakes / Axel Meyer; title: From Darwin to DNA : the genetic basis of color adaptations / Hopi E. Hoekstra; title: Fossil discovery and the origin of tetrapods / Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin; title: Longhorns, whitetails, and the evolution of "wild" / Harry W. Greene