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The Evolution of Individuality
 
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The Evolution of Individuality (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: heritable divisions, secondary somatic differentiation, maternal predestination, New York, Maynard Smith, August Weismann (more...)
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  Hardcover, November 30, 1987 -- -- $171.18
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"This is the most stimulating book about evolution I have read for a long time."--JOHN MAYNARD SMITH, The University of Sussex

`Leo Buss's ideas are almost totally new and exceedingly important. In my view this book will be a milestone in the study of evolution."-JOHN TYLER BONNER, Princeton University

Leo Buss expounds a general theory of development through a simple hierarchical extension of the synthetic theory of evolution. He perceives innovations in development to have evolved in ancestral organisms where the germ line was not closed to genetic variation arising during the course of ontogeny. Variants that favor both the proliferation of the cell lineage and the organism harboring them were sequentially incorporated in an increasingly sophisticated epigenetic program. In contrast, variants that favor the replication of the cell lineage at the expense of the individual were eliminated and ultimately favored the fixation of variants that limited the production and/or expression of subsequent variation, creating a stable developmental system.

The author traces the origin of the modern preoccupation with the individual as a unit of selection to its historical foundations in the works of August Weismann, exposing defects in the translation of the nineteenth-century germ-soma doctrine into modern evolutionary language. Recognizing that the germ-soma barrier is a derived evolutionary state, Professor Buss illustrates how patterns in embryonic cleavage, gastrulation, mosaicism, induction, and competence arise as a consequence of the often conflicting evolutionary interests of cells and individuals. Building on this foundation, he argues that evolution of controls over the heritability of cell lineages have come to fix developmental programs and establish heterochrony as the principal vehicle of evolutionary change. Finally, Professor Buss argues that the perspective applied to development can be generalized and applied to other transitions between units of selection that have occurred in the history of life.

Leo W. Buss is Associate Professor of Biology at Yale University. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 201 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press (December 1987)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0691084688
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691084688
  • Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.8 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,504,187 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Leo W. Buss
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
heritable divisions, secondary somatic differentiation, maternal predestination, somatic duties, simultaneous cell division, replicatory advantage, variant cell lineages, totipotent lineage, somatic ecology, coenocytic condition, earliest ontogeny, gene selectionist view, selfish innovation, detrimental variants, somatic environment, ciliated blastula, ancestral constraint, terminal determination, gene selectionism, metazoan development, unequal cleavage, metazoan taxa, somatic lineages, embryonic determination, multicellular state
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Maynard Smith, August Weismann, Cambridge University Press, Academic Press, New Haven, San Francisco, Stephen Jay Gould, Clarendon Press, George Gaylord Simpson, Hilde Mangold, The Selfish Gene
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Bold Contribution to the Evolution of Development, July 10, 2007
This review is from: The Evolution of Individuality (Paperback)
Dr. Buss's work is a theoretical attempt to conceptualize the history of life as a history of ever-increasing cohesive units; the "individual" as we know it, as a discrete, functionally integrated unit, is taken for granted in modern evolutionary theory and generalized over the whole of biological diversity and history. However, Buss contends that, at present as in the past, "individuality" so taken is a matter of degree. Tightly knit functional multicellular individuality has evolved because of archaic competition between cell lineages with interests that have often been at odds with the wholes they comprised. He offers supporting evidence from embryology, developmental biology, genetics, and evolutionary biology to support his position. Though very heavy on theory, a good dose of exposure, or at least appreciation, of the above fields is helpful to navigate through his many illustrations. Overall, an interesting work and, no doubt, a bold contribution to contemporary evolutionary developmental biology.
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