Customer Reviews

HOW THE LEOPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS: The Evolution of Complexity

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

 

 

The main theme is about how DNA doesn't need to provide information in every detail to produce an organism. Chemical, physical and mathematical forces also play a significant part in the production of an organism. The book is also about how natural selection is not the only process at work for evolutionary advancement. I totally agree with the conclusion, and he's sure changed my thoughts on the subject, but it was a challenge to read it all because of the way it is written. It could have been more fun.

For the others that read this book and still don't get "how the leopard changed its spots" - its a metaphor. Leopards aren't supposed to change their spots. The leopard symbolises scientists like Richard Dawkins and others who are fixated with genetic evolution and DNA. After reading this book, will they change their ways? Its not about leopards!

It does have loads of fascinating examples, with all the relevant diagrams & figures to make the point clear, so he's done a good job assembling all of those. From ant colonies & the BZ reaction, to evolution of the eye & fibrillation in the human heart. An example: it is the concentration of calcium that causes the single celled organism (Acetabularia) to grow to a particular shape, NOT the DNA. He also explains why a sunflower seed head forms a spiral, and it is all to do with mathematics, nothing to do with sunflower DNA.

The trouble with this book is that the author uses the word "dynamic" waaaay too much. It quickly becomes very annoying. He is obsessed with that word. Open the book at random, and you will see what I am talking about. Aside from that, it is very tedious to read. Instead of making the ideas easily understood, it seems Brian Goodwin goes out of his way to make it complicated.

I'd really like to give it 3.5 stars, because at the end of it I was glad I read it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone, because there are better books out there (you might like to see my other reviews on popular science books). Remember that you can only read a limited number of books in your lifetime, and this one is not perfect. Buy it ONLY if you're specifically interested in this field of science OR you've read all the truly good books out there and want to lower your standards a bit and still keep reading popular science!

This book is an easy and interesting reading about morphogenesis, which if I understood correctly, is a new branch of biology that tries to explain things that cannot be explained through genetics or evolution alone. It does not contradict existing knowledge or Darwinism, on the contrary, it seems to build on genetics in a beautiful way to complement it.

For example, after cutting off the nucleus from a one-celled algae named acetabularia, its corolarium still grows from the stem. Afterwards, the algae cannot reproduce itself or even synthesize more proteins (since DNA with all its genetic code for producing proteins is located in the nucleus and is therefore gone) and acetabularia dies. The author suggests that the "information" to generate the corolarium in its precise form might be the result of chemical and physical properties of some minerals in the stem, not of genetic instructions (since these are not available anymore at the time the corolarium develops). He is not claiming that genetic instructions are not vital (acetabularia dies when the nucleus is removed), he is just saying that development, specially the "form" could depend on physical and chemical properties of the medium inside the cell (in the end, this medium is also determined by DNA and genetics).

I have read that if you introduce with surgery mother cells into a mammal's brain, new neurons are formed from the mother cells. (For further reference see A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain). Why not liver cells? There must be some physical or chemical signal in the medium, be it electrical signals, radiation, vibration or resonance, chemical reactions, temperature, pressure, magnetism, a morphogenetic field (which I understood as an intrinsic pattern arising from the mix of substances in the medium; the word morphogenetic just because this medium creates or originates a pattern or form specific to the species) or whatever other signal you might think of, to tell the newcomer: "hey, you are inside a brain", so that it becomes a neuron and not a liver cell.

I would think that in order to rule about every little detail of development, there should be a lot of genes in our genome (which in fact there are), but geneticists were expecting to find a lot more than what they really found when Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA. So why shouln't DNA accept a little help from other friends inside the tremendously complex living organisms? Why should it be responsible of everything? A probably complementary approach can be found in evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo), as described in Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo) and Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Vintage).

The explanation of pattern formation even in chemical reactions was extremely interesting, it opened my horizon to look for more information on pattern formation in complex systems. (Complexity, chaos, etc.) If a book is able to make you wish to know more about a topic, it is definitely a 5 star book. Good translation into Spanish by Tusquets /Metatemas by the way.

Standard evolutionary biology assumes that the patterns of evolution observed in nature are mainly the result of historical contingency and natural selection. This book introduces a rather different perspective, showing that there are many fundamental dynamical constraints operating in natural systems. Natural selection acts on this restricted number of possibilities, which are in the end the main forces in shaping our biosphere. A very recomendable reading.

Brian Goodwin's book might be worth reading from the perspective that it brings a voice to a little-heard structuralist perspective on evolution. As a biologist myself, though, I have to say that Goodwin misses the mark. Goodwin's knowledge of Darwinian theory is inadequate to critique it, and his knowledge of genetics abyssmal.

Goodwin's central thesis is that organisms adapt out of a structural interaction with the environment. Sort of like a crystal forming on an icy window. Interesting idea, and perhaps with some developmental relevance, but the simple fact that two genetically different organisms placed in an identical environment (an experiment that has been repeated ad naseum since the invention of genetics) are observed to develop differently pretty much lays ruin to Goodwin's thesis.

Readers who are not scientists should know that Goodwin's ideas are tin-foil-hat fringe and lacking in both empirical support and in any demonstration that they lead to a productive research program. This is not a book to read if you wish to learn anything about evolutionary science. It is a book to read if you'd like a novel- if not entirely sane- view on biological change.

Goodwin and some others like to call his point a view a new theory of evolution. Call it what you will, I think it falls way short of a new theory, mostly in the body of evidence category, but also because it doesn't understand and refute Darwinian theory.

What it is, is, a collection of interesting observations that points out that not all in morphology is determined by genetics, but that "excitable systems" are responsible for some aspects of developement and speciation. To me, this helps explains the sources of randomness and arbitrary choice we see in genetic drift or in neutral adapation theory. It is an interesting new flavor in the frosting of the Darwinian cake, but it is not a new cake.

What irritates me to no end about this book is the last two chapters, in which Goodwin makes a totally unsubstantiated (and barely followable) leap to connect his work to the Gaia hypothesis. Here he becomes cloyingly sweet and politically correct in one breath, and it is here that I finally suffocated.

This book is the source of a widely circulated quote by William Dembski which proves beyond a doubt that neither Goodwin nor Dembski has the faintest idea of how evolution works.

Goodwin describes how Sol Spiegelman put some viral RNA in a test tube, along with a "replicase" molecule whose job is to duplicate RNA. He heated the RNA for a while to force the replicase to make copies of the RNA, then took a sample, purified it and used it to innoculate a second test tube. After the RNA in that test tube had been copied, he took a sample, purified it and used it to innoculate a third test tube. This continued for twenty some "generations", at which time the RNA was reduced to a small fraction of its original length and was duplicating much faster than the original because there was so much less to duplicate.

First Goodwin, then Dembski and now the whole Intelligent Design universe think this somehow shows that evolution is impossible. What it actually shows is that if RNA or DNA has no function, it won't be missed if it disappears - and 90 percent of the RNA had no function in the test tube environment. The only parts that were doing something were the parts that the replicase used to find the start and end points for its copying function.

This is made abundantly clear in the original paper when Spiegelman states that after the fourth transfer, the RNA became incapable of infecting a cell. That means that in real life, the "experiment" would have stopped right there because the shortened, defective RNA would not have been passed on.

Unfortunately, first Goodwin and then Dembski completely misunderstood this experiment and now Dembski has spread the misunderstanding to the entire religious community. They both owe the world an apology.

This is a great book. Readers interested in understanding the rules that shape morphogenesis over evolution should read it. Goodwin provides convincing evidence for fundamental dynamic rules involved in the generation of form. Together with natural selection, these mechanisms offer a more complete view of how evolution works.

The appealing title led me to read this book but after finishing it I don't feel I have any better idea of why a leopard has spots or changes them. Not a book about evolution and heredity of leopards at all, in fact there is no listing for "leopard" in the index. Instead Godwin addresses genetics in terms of "sciences of complexity". I would need more than my casual understanding of things biological to really appreciate this book.

After I finish this book, I still don't know how leopard changed its spot. The findings the author presnts in this book bases on inductiive processes. And the evidences used to support his idea are not concrete enough to make that strong conclusion. Further, I was much annoyed by a lot of biology jargons.

A very interesting read... Excellent introduction to the evolutionary debate for the non scientist.