Customer Reviews

Modularity: Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology)

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This is a very interesting book. Or at least, it's a book about a cluster of very interesting topics, and occasionally contains interesting insights about these topics.

The problem is that the book is a bit too modular - the chapters don't work very well together. Every author seems to have his own concept of modularity. As several of the chapters are primarily concerned with defining modularity, this could be taken to be a good thing, but it isn't. The simple reason is that many of the concepts of modularity are simply not interesting to many readers. For me, Calabretta's chapter was very interesting, as well as Simon's introduction and some other chapters, but the chapters on modularity in art and in animal skeletons were just plain uninteresting. (Which is not to say that they are bad chapters in themselves, they are probably higly relevant to some people.)

Given that the book is likely to contain just a few chapters that interest you, I think the price is a bit too high for it to be worth buying.