Customer Reviews

Living Anatomy: Structure as the Mirror of Function

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Living Anatomy is a different kind of A&P text, one which focuses on understanding A&P and not memorizing an enormous amount of information. If I had used this text for my undergraduate text in A&P I would have LEARNED MUCH MORE ANATOMY AND, MORE IMPORTANT WOULD HAVE ENJOYED THE COURSE MORE. The book I used was King and Showers,5th edition, a text that has been around for many years but uses the facts and more facts approach and in my experience tended to turn off students (fortunately my love for biology and science was such that nothing turned me off). The book reads like a story book and will appeal to general readers. The author is a professor of anatomy at the University of Melbourne and has a long string of publications under his belt. I noted some mistakes, such as the claim, commonly repeated, but now shown to be in error by several studies, that we share 99 percent of our DNA with gorillas (actually chimps), a number that came from early hybridization studies. One comment I found interesting, which was found on page 424, was human anatomy is "certainly vastly more complex than the ticking watch cited in chapter 1, which by its very existence seemed to demand the presence of a watchmaker" an admission that I have seen more often in science books as of late. This may say something about the success of the Intelligent Design movement in reaching professional scientists. This text certainly supports the view that the body is marvelously designed, as are the bodies of all life. A study of A&P vividly confirms this conclusion