Today developmental and evolutionary biologists are focussing renewed attention on the developmental process--those genetic and cellular factors that influence variation in individual body shape or metabolism--in an attempt to better understand how evolutionary trends and patterns within individuals might be limited and controlled. In this important work, the author reviews the classical literature on embryology, morphogenesis, and paleontology, and presents recent genetic and molecular studies on development. The result is a unique perspective on a set of problems of fundamental importance...
Today developmental and evolutionary biologists are focussing renewed attention on the developmental process--those genetic and cellular factors that ...
The great Piltdown fraud, the mystery of how a shark swims with an asymmetric tail, the debate over dinosaur extinction, the haunting beauty of a loon on a northern lake--these are only a few of the subjects discussed by Keith Stewart Thomson in this wide-ranging book. At once instructive and entertaining, the book celebrates the aesthetic, literary, and intellectual aspects of science and conveys what is involved in being a scientist today--the excitement of discovery and puzzle solving, the debate over what to read and what to write, and the element of promotion that seems to be necessary...
The great Piltdown fraud, the mystery of how a shark swims with an asymmetric tail, the debate over dinosaur extinction, the haunting beauty of a loon...
Living Fossil describes the life and habitat of the coelcanth and what scientists have learned about it during fifty years of research. It is an exciting and very human story, filled with ambitious and brilliant people, that reveals much about the practice of modern science.
Living Fossil describes the life and habitat of the coelcanth and what scientists have learned about it during fifty years of research. It is...
The uncovering in the mid-1700s of fossilized mastodon bones and teeth at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, signaled the beginning of a great American adventure. The West was opening up and unexplored lands beckoned. Unimagined paleontological treasures awaited discovery: strange horned mammals, birds with teeth, flying reptiles, gigantic fish, diminutive ancestors of horses and camels, and more than a hundred different kinds of dinosaurs. This exciting book tells the story of the grandest period of fossil discovery in American history, the years from 1750 to 1890. The volume begins with Thomas...
The uncovering in the mid-1700s of fossilized mastodon bones and teeth at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, signaled the beginning of a great American adventur...
What sort of person was the young naturalist who developed an evolutionary idea so logical, so dangerous, that it has dominated biological science for a century and a half? How did the quiet and shy Charles Darwin produce his theory of natural selection when many before him had started down the same path but failed? This book is the first to inquire into the range of influences and ideas, the mentors and rivals, and the formal and informal education that shaped Charles Darwin and prepared him for his remarkable career of scientific achievement.
Keith Thomson concentrates on Darwin's...
What sort of person was the young naturalist who developed an evolutionary idea so logical, so dangerous, that it has dominated biological science ...
A distinguished scholar urges scientists and religious thinkers to become colleagues rather than adversaries in areas where their fields overlap
Each age has its own crisis--our modern experience of science-religion conflict is not so very different from that experienced by our forebears, Keith Thomson proposes in this thoughtful book. He considers the ideas and writings of Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin, two men who struggled mightily to reconcile their religion and their science, then looks to more recent times when scientific challenges to religion (evolutionary...
A distinguished scholar urges scientists and religious thinkers to become colleagues rather than adversaries in areas where their fields overlap
