Customer Reviews

Genomic Regulatory Systems: In Development and Evolution

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

On the back of this book's cover we read, "authoritative and easy to read". We may grant the first, but hardly the second. Davidson has worked for a long time at the cutting edge of cell-biological research, and makes it quite clear that our knowledge of the process by which the genes produce the organism they give rise to, is far from complete. Presenting numerous interesting examples, always supported by excellent illustrations, he offers us a fascinating sketch of the way the genetic DNA material in the chromosomes is translated into a developmental process in the organism, from fertilized egg to adult. He carries us far beyond the revolutionary ideas in Darwin's "Origin of Species" from 1859, and also beyond the "Neo-Darwinians", whose ideas on evolution and development dominated most of the 20th century. Not being a biologist, but rather a historian of ideas, predominantly in the field of natural science, I am impressed by the recent advances in biology after Crick's and Watson's discovery of the DNA double spiral as the material basis of the genome. We might say that the Neo-Darwinists, like Darwin himself, regarded the genes as fairly independent "elements", or "atoms" of heredity, each responsible for its own part (or characteristic trait) of the organism. The essentially random variation of those elements provided the raw material for Natural Selection, and thereby Evolution. That was also for a long time my own view. This book has forced me to adopt a new perspective. However, it seems to me that the "elemental" view of the genes has an entrenched position among the general public, who use it in arguments both for and against the Darwinian theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Davidson insists that the genes are by no means independent elements. They are very much dependent on each other. In particular, a rather limited number of them, which he calls regulatory genes, are especially important in evolution (and of course also in the development from the fertilized egg to the adult). He also stresses very strongly that the characteristics of an organism are not at all the creation of individual genes, but of a considerable number of genes working in concert, to a large extent orchestrated by the regulatory genes. Thus the whole process stands out as much more powerful, but also as extremely complicated. This is as it should be: who would deny that life is a complex phenomenon? To anybody interested in Evolution -- and in Man's place in Nature -- Davidson's book provides much food for thought. But note: unless you have a good grounding in biology, do not expect an "easy read".

This book is complementary too, but on a more advanced level than Sean Carroll's From DNA To Diversity, which I strongly recommend as a great intro book to evo-devo. Davidson's book is tough going in places, which is why I gave it one star off, but the material is in fairness quite complex. He emphasizes the role of cis-regulatory sequences in genes and the structure of the systems that regulate gene expression in development and evolution in some detail. It becomes clear how minor mutations in the regulatory part of a gene can transform how it is expressed, and why the importance for evolution in mutations in gene expression is clearly much greater than for mutations in the protein coding sequence. His explanation for what is responsible for the incredible homologies in, for example, the pax 6 gene that regulates eye development across phyla is very illuminating. A must read for anybody interested in the molecular basis for development and evolution.

Genomic Regulatory Systems : development and evolution, by
Eric Davidson

The book is about how the genome actually works in [embryo?] development.
It is a beautiful book with many attractive illustrations.
The book's introductory material and
that of each chapter is clear and interesting.
I enjoyed about 3 valuable hours with this book
before getting lost because of my inadequate background (nonbio major).
He gives 4 reasons why this field has been so exciting over the past decade:
(1) We can now bring regulatory hard wiring at
the DNA nucleotide level into concise functional focus,
(2) We now have the full DNA sequence,
(3) Good minds from evolution and from development have converged,
(4) A lot of confusion in molecular phylogeny has been cleared up.

The book is mostly about bilaterians.
The size of the genome within a clade [some very similar critters]
can vary by a factor of ten whereas
the variation in protein coding (mRNA) is much smaller.
Amniotes [embryo in sac] have 4 hox clusters on 4 chromosomes.
There are remarkable examples of diverse usage of similar genes
of diverse organisms.
I don't think he defines the difference between cis- regulatory elements
[within the chromosome] and trans- [across chromosomes] so I needed
to do some guessing or find some other references.
Next time I take another look at this book,
I'll probably restart back about page 9.
I noticed on page 110 on the morphogenesis of heart parts
that different genes were identified for right and left sides
of the heart -- a matter of interest to me as my apparantly healthy 25 year old son ...died suddenly and unexpectedly
of natural causes,***many tears***, presumably a heart attack.
Perhaps the next decade or two will bring life-saving diagnostics.

This is a very intersting book on an amazing topic which is straightforward enough for an interested educted layman to understand. But unfortunately it is a wierd mix of chatty remarks and pointlessly obstruse passages that read like letters to Nature.

The very worst thing is the illustrations and blurbs. The design is so bad that it really is hilarious at times. Sometimes the blurbs are so long they are spread onto the next page. The contain three or four different fonts in the same sentence. The sources of the information are pointless mixed with non-technical information about the content...

There is no logic in the way "subillustrations" are combined to illustrations. (Why do they insist on subillustrations at all? Why not make separate illustration?) They are just slapped together any old way. Sometime there are additional frams, sometimes not. Even the numbering convention varies. The order that the subillustration appear in the illustrations is also random.

The book is almost impossible to read. It needs to go back to the publisher and be totally reorganized for readability.

What a pity. The content is actually fascinating.

The book itself is terrific. It's not really introductory, but is an excellent, well organized overview of the topic. Some of it is already a bit dated (e.g., estimates of the number of human genes) but these gaps hardly detract from the overall value: the principles of evo-devo are better articulated here than just about any other source I know. However, the excellent examples depend heavily on the figures, which are not reproduced in color in the Kindle edition. That is, I can read some Kindle books on my Mac or iPad, and the figures are in color, but for THIS book they are in black and white). This is a terrible loss, because the beautiful figures are essentially uninterpretable in black and white.