While neo-Darwinism has considerable explanatory power, it is widely recognized as lacking a component dealing with individual development, or ontogeny. This lack is particularly conspicuous when attempting to explain the evolutionary origin of the thirty-five or so animal body plans, and of the developmental trajectories that generate them. This significant work examines both the origin of body plans in particular and the evolution of animal development in general. Wallace Arthur ranges widely in his treatment, covering topics as diverse as comparative developmental genetics, selection...
While neo-Darwinism has considerable explanatory power, it is widely recognized as lacking a component dealing with individual development, or ontogen...
Aimed primarily at a general readership and college students of biology, this book focuses on the question of how embryonic development changes in the course of evolution, thus giving rise to new types of creatures. It takes the view that biases in the ways that embryos can be altered are as important as natural selection in determining the directions that evolution has taken, including the one that led to the origin of humans.
Aimed primarily at a general readership and college students of biology, this book focuses on the question of how embryonic development changes in the...
The most important aspect of evolution, from a philosophical viewpoint, is the rise of complex, advanced creatures from simple, primitive ones. This "vertical" dimension of evolution has been downplayed in both the specialist and popular literature on evolution, in large part because it was in the past associated with unsavory political views. The avoidance of evolution's vertical dimension has, however, left evolutionary biology open to the perception, from outside, that it deals merely with the diversification of rather similar creatures, all at the same level of "advancedness" from a...
The most important aspect of evolution, from a philosophical viewpoint, is the rise of complex, advanced creatures from simple, primitive ones. Thi...
All humans share three origins: the beginning of our individual lives, the appearance of life on Earth, and the formation of our planetary home. Life through Time and Space brings together the latest discoveries in both biology and astronomy to examine our deepest questions about where we came from, where we are going, and whether we are alone in the cosmos.
A distinctive voice in the growing field of astrobiology, Wallace Arthur combines embryological, evolutionary, and cosmological perspectives to tell the story of life on Earth and its potential to exist elsewhere in the...
All humans share three origins: the beginning of our individual lives, the appearance of life on Earth, and the formation of our planetary home.
