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Title: Developmental Plasticity and Evolution by Mary Jane West-Eberhard ISBN: 0-19-512235-6 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Adaptive, flexible phenotypes: A radical, very good idea
Comment: This book is meant to educate - to lead away from the sterile debates of causation as NATURE OR NURTURE. It is a monumental achievement by a careful thinker (recent recepient of the SSE's Sewall Wright award), and it will likely change the way you think about how genes and environments interact through development to affect phenotypic expression. If you have ever been confused about ideas in evolutionary process and how phenotypes arise, this is a book you should read. West-Eberhard's treatment of the more-difficult ideas is comprehensive - with enough examples to appeal to the backgrounds of most readers. The book is full of wonderful details of animal behavior, plant biology, the social wasps West-Eberhard has watched her whole life, and much, much more. It will spark much new research - perhaps for decades to come. It will become a citation classic. She has taken on one of the more contentious of all modern debates. For that, for her exhaustive discussion, and for the power of her conclusions, she will be criticized and rediculed. Take my advice: buy the book, read it, think about what it says, and decide for yourself . I think West-Eberhard's achievement is an awesome contribution.
Rating: 5
Summary: commentary
Comment: Did the Boston critic fail to find his or her name cited? Perusal would have turned up references to work published in 2000,2001 and 2002. The review was not helpful!
Rating: 2
Summary: A failed attempt from a respected evolutionary biologist
Comment: This is a genuinely disappointing text from West-Eberhard, one of the most well-respected evolutionary biologists around. It reads as if written in a bubble at STRI (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), and from the perspective of someone unable to keep up with the explosion of information in developmental and molecular biology of the past 5-10 years. West-Eberhard never convinces me that she even understands much of the elegant work done by these scientists, or if she does, writes so poorly as to bog the reader down not so much in jargon, but poorly defined broad concepts that do nothing to advance the ideas of the book. "Development" appears as every other word in the introduction, yet exactly what the author's definition of "development" is continually eludes the reader. Couple this with the fact that it seems as though she struggled with this book for many years (a scan of the references reveals them to be sadly out of date - my quick look found the most recent to be 1997), and you have a book that may have helped shape thought in this area 10 years ago, but is simply an afterthought in today's booming expanse of scientific knowledge. I look forward to a different synthesis from someone trained as both a cutting edge devo-evo researcher as well as a thoughtful evolutionary theoretician. But this isn't it...
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Title: Phenotypic Evolution: A Reaction Norm Perspective by Carl D. Schlichting, Massimo Pigliucci ISBN: 0878937994 Publisher: Sinauer Associates, Inc. Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $54.95 |
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Title: Niche Construction : The Neglected Process in Evolution by F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, Marcus W. Feldman ISBN: 0691044376 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 02 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.50 |
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Title: Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology : by Brian K. Hall, Wendy M. Olson ISBN: 0674009045 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $59.95 |
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Title: Darwin and Design : Does Evolution Have a Purpose? by Michael Ruse ISBN: 067401023X Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Development of Animal Form : Ontogeny, Morphology, and Evolution by Alessandro Minelli ISBN: 0521808510 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 03 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $75.00 |
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