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John Tyler Bonner makes a new attack on an old problem: the
question of how progressive increase in the size and complexity of animals and
plants has occurred. "How is it," he inquires, "that an egg turns
into an elaborate adult? How is it that a bacterium, given many millions of years,
could have evolved into an elephant?" The author argues that we can understand
this progression in terms of natural selection, but that in order to do so we
must consider the role of development -- or more precisely the role of life cycles
-- in evolutionary change. In a lively writing style that will be familiar to
readers of his book The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton, 1980),
Bonner addresses a general audience interested in biology, as well as specialists
in all areas of evolutionary biology.
What is novel in the approach used here
is the comparison of complexity inside the organism (especially cell differentiation)
with the complexity outside (that is, within an ecological community). Matters
of size at both these levels are closely related to complexity. The book shows
how an understanding of the grand course of evolution can come from combining
our knowledge of genetics, development, ecology, and even behavior.
John
Tyler Bonner is George M. Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University
and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. |
