Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Evolution

In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley's Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, the spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley's landmark...

Primate locomotion has typically been studied from two points of view. Laboratory-based researchers have focused on aspects like biomechanics and energetics, whereas field-based researchers have focused on (locomotor) behaviour and ecology. Unfortunately, to date, there is relatively little scientific exchange between both groups. With a book, which will be the result of a symposium on the 2008 Meeting of the International Primatological Society in Edinburgh, we would like to bring together laboratory and field-based primate locomotion studies. We are convinced this will be beneficial for...

Life on earth is characterized by three striking phenomena that demand explanation: adaptation the marvelous fit between organism and environment; diversity the great variety of organisms; and complexity the enormous intricacy of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity? Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon argue that there exists in evolution a spontaneous tendency toward increased diversity and complexity, one that acts whether natural selection is present or not. They call this tendency a biological law the Zero-Force...

More than eighty years ago, before we knew much about the structure of cells, Russian botanist Boris Kozo-Polyansky brilliantly outlined the concept of symbiogenesis, the symbiotic origin of cells with nuclei. It was a half-century later, only when experimental approaches that Kozo-Polyansky lacked were applied to his hypotheses, that scientists began to accept his view that symbiogenesis could be united with Darwin's concept of natural selection to explain the evolution of life. After decades of neglect, ridicule, and intellectual abuse, Kozo-Polyansky's ideas are now endorsed by...