Endless forms most beautiful : the new science of evo devo and the making of the animal kingdom / Sean B. Carroll ; with illustrations by Jamie W. Carroll, Josh P. Klaiss, Leanne M. Olds.
"The greatest spectacle of life is how a single cell - the fertilized egg - develops into a billion- or trillion-celled animal. In the case of humans, that single cell becomes the most complex machine in existence. Scientists have long known that if they could figure out how form and pattern em...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Norton,
[2005]
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "The greatest spectacle of life is how a single cell - the fertilized egg - develops into a billion- or trillion-celled animal. In the case of humans, that single cell becomes the most complex machine in existence. Scientists have long known that if they could figure out how form and pattern emerge in embryos, they could begin to understand how today's incredibly diverse animal kingdom evolved from primitive forms over 600 million years ago. For over a century, then, opening the black box of the embryo has been the Holy Grail of biology." "The box has finally been unbolted. And Evo Devo - evolutionary developmental biology - is the new scientific crowbar that accomplished the feat. In the pages of Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean B. Carroll, one of the pioneers of Evo Devo, explains this astounding scientific revolution." "Researchers now know that life's building materials are few, and they were "invented" near the dawn of animals. More specifically, a surprisingly small number of genes - "tool kit genes" - are the primary components for building all animals, and these genes emerged at a time before the Cambrian Explosion, some 600 million years ago. Thus the amazing diversity of the animal kingdom is the result of the flexibility of a small number of building blocks that have existed for eons."--BOOK JACKET. |
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| Physical Description: | xi, 350 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some colour) ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-328) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0393060160 9780393060164 |