Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Evolution

In this companion volume to Bird Coloration: Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements, Geoffrey E. Hill and Kevin J. McGraw have assembled some of the world's leading experts in the function and evolution of bird coloration to contribute to a long-overdue synthesis of a burgeoning field of inquiry. In Volume 2, the authors turn from the problem of how birds see and produce color and how researchers measure it, to what is the function of the colorful displays of birds and what are the factors that shape the evolution of color signals.

The contributors to this volume begin by...

In this forcefully argued book, the leading evolutionary theorist of language draws on evidence from evolutionary biology, genetics, physical anthropology, anatomy, and neuroscience, to provide a framework for studying the evolution of human language and cognition.

Philip Lieberman argues forcibly that the widely influential theories of language's development, advanced by Chomskian linguists and cognitive scientists, especially those that postulate a single dedicated language "module," "organ," or "instinct," are inconsistent with principles and findings of evolutionary biology and...

In 1997, even as Pope John Paul II was conceding that evolution was "more than just a theory," local school boards and state legislatures were still wrangling over the teaching of origins--and nearly half of all Americans polled believed in the recent special creation of the first humans. Why do so many Americans still resist the ideas laid out by Darwin in On the Origin of Species? Focusing on crucial aspects of the history of Darwinism in America, Ronald Numbers gets to the heart of this question.

Judiciously assessing the facts, Numbers refutes a host of widespread...

Rarely has a scholar attained such popular acclaim merely by doing what he does best and enjoys most. But such is Stephen Jay Gould's command of paleontology and evolutionary theory, and his gift for brilliant explication, that he has brought dust and dead bones to life, and developed an immense following for the seeming arcana of this field.

In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle his subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought--the discovery of "deep time," the vastness of earth's history, a history so ancient that we can comprehend it only as metaphor....

In 1984 a team of paleoanthropologists on a dig in northern Kenya found something extraordinary: a nearly complete skeleton of Homo erectus, a creature that lived 1.5 million years ago and is widely thought to be the missing link between apes and humans. The remains belonged to a tall, rangy adolescent male. The researchers called him "Nariokotome boy."

In this immensely lively book, Alan Walker, one of the lead researchers, and his wife...

Darwin's Origin of Species and Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species have been the cornerstones of modern evolutionary and population genetic theory for the past hundred years, but in the twenty-first century, biologists will face graver problems of extinction. In this collection, a team of leading biologists demonstrates why the burgeoning field of conservation biology must continue to rely on the insights of population genetics if we are to preserve the diversity of living species. Technological and theoretical developments throughout the 1990s have allowed for...

A growing body of evidence has begun to reveal flaws in the traditional assumption of female passivity and lack of discrimination after copulation has begun. William Eberhard has compiled an impressive array of research on the ability of females to shape the outcome of mating. He describes studies of many different cryptic mechanisms by which a female can accept a male for copulation but nevertheless reject him as a father. Evidence from various fields indicates that such selectivity by females may be the norm rather than the exception. Because most post-copulatory competition between...

Synthesizing studies of parental care in a wide variety of animals, this book is the first attempt to provide general answers to the following important questions: Why does the extent of parental care vary so widely between species? Why do only females care for eggs and young in some animals, only males in others, and both parents in a few? To what extent is parental care adjusted to variation in its benefits to offspring and its costs to parents? How do parents divide their resources between their sons and daughters? In this book separate chapters examine the evolution of variation in egg...

The enormous recent success of molecular developmental biology has yielded a vast amount of new information on the details of development. So much so that we risk losing sight of the underlying principles that apply to all development. To cut through this thicket, John Tyler Bonner ponders a moment in evolution when development was at its most basic--the moment when signaling between cells began. Although multicellularity arose numerous times, most of those events happened many millions of years ago. Many of the details of development that we see today, even in simple organisms, accrued...

One of the greatest mysteries in reconstructing the history of life on Earth has been the apparent absence of fossils dating back more than 550 million years. We have long known that fossils of sophisticated marine life-forms existed at the dawn of the Cambrian Period, but until recently scientists had found no traces of Precambrian fossils. The quest to find such traces began in earnest in the mid-1960s and culminated in one dramatic moment in 1993 when William Schopf identified fossilized microorganisms three and a half billion years old. This startling find opened up a vast...

The past decade has seen a profound change in the scientific understanding of reproduction. The traditional view of reproduction as a joint venture undertaken by two individuals, aimed at replicating their common genome, is being challenged by a growing body of evidence showing that the evolutionary interests of interacting males and females diverge. This book demonstrates that, despite a shared genome, conflicts between interacting males and females are ubiquitous, and that selection in the two sexes is continuously pulling this genome in opposite directions. These conflicts drive the...