Customer Reviews

Biased Embryos and Evolution

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I just felt I needed to counteract that one other review currently posted.

This book is very easy to read, and the author takes great pains to make it very accessible to a wide range of audiences. He eschews jargon, and gives credit where credit is due (this in contrast, for example, to Sean Carroll's popular books on the subject which often are almost entirely devoid of references). He reduces complex subjects to a core of important concepts that he communicates playfully and succinctly. I tip my hat to him.

The key insight of the book is that "developmental constraints" is too negative a terminology, and "developmental bias" should be used instead. This is completely right on, in my opinion, and I hope the scientific community adopts his suggestion here.

My complaint is that he never really drives home the point about *why* development is biased. To do this, one needs to go into the details of biochemistry and molecular biology at a level to which that this book does not venture.

Nevertheless, the thoughts in this book are best understood as a set of guiding principles as we move forward, and as such, I recommend it to the EvoDevo researcher and the interested layman alike.

Lets see, The author wants to say that the constraints on how an embryo can be grown will affect what possible phenotypes are actualised. Well that seems plausible enough, I would be interesting in finding out more about HOW to actually grow an embryo? why cant you grow a wheel and axle? But the author doesn't know, too bad. All he can do is talk about how English he is and how great is its to be English and that development must have _somthing_ to do with evolution, Oh and by they way the author is English.