First some caveats about this review: I'm just an avid amateur, at the level of those who read Scientific American obsessively. My professional field is computer science. I've noticed that my mind gets slower and poorer as I get up in years. And I didn't read the whole book (I read about a third, lightly skimmed another third, and skipped entire chapters that didn't seem of interest). So it's very possible I either don't have adequate background to really understand, or just plain don't "get it". Keeping those caveats in mind, read on:
The book is especially good at the mechanics of organism growth, a sort of modern detailed follow-on to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's "On Growth and Form". It provides (maybe unintentionally) a whole lot of suggestions for research directions. The organization is excellent, one of the best I've ever seen. And the writing is very good: relatively informal without being "breezy", clear without being pedantic, and accurate without being obscurantist. There are no equations at all, and very few numeric research results. In fact, the only quantitative reasoning is the slope of a line in a few very generic graphs. Mathophobes need not have any fear. (In fact, the lack of quantitative reasoning when focusing on evolution is a bit worrying.)
However, I found the core theme suggested by the title was not adequately addressed.
For starters, the book isn't what I was looking for and expecting. From the title, I expected from a development point of view the addressing of the same general subject area as "Energy Flow in Biology" by Harold J. Morowitz or "Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan. But that's not what the book is really about.
The book's real focus starts with the _perception_ that living organisms on earth inevitably increase in size. This perception is almost universal, yet it remains a dirty little secret that very few really talk about. Well, this book not only talks about it, but talks in detail about it and in particular how it might have come to be. I agree it's not just something that should be swept back under the rug; it's a real question that deserves a real answer. I expected the book would immediately subdivide and clarify the question to try to crisp it up: How much is just perception, and how much is reality? Is it more prominent at one particular time scale? How many exceptions are there? Are we talking about individuals, or a single species, or a whole taxonomic kingdom, or all of life on earth? Are we talking about the development and growth of each individual over its lifespan, or about a sequence of representative individuals over evolutionary time? Do larger sized organisms come from old taxa or new taxa? My impression is the book does in fact address most of these questions; but where the answer is "sorta" or "maybe" or "often" -which is most of the time- the responses are unfortunately rather muddled. My expectation that the subdivisions of the central question would be treated to the same careful organization the book shows in other respects was unfortunately dashed.
"Evolution's" definition and use just doesn't "feel" quite right to me; my impression was of a kid with a shiny new toy who hasn't yet quite mastered how to work it in every situation. A few times the book actually explicitly makes the argument that there are various explanations of how something might have come to be, of which natural selection is the best explanation. Well, duh... Several times I got the feeling that a sort of teleology was creeping in, that evolution was assumed to have some sort of direction or to lead to some sort of progress (whatever that is). And the idea that sometimes evolutionary developments that are initially just "byproducts" are later used as material for further evolution (argued in "The Spandrels of San Marco" by S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin) is dramatically over-emphasized. It seems that rather than just being something that happens once in a while, this use of extra genetic material is elevated to some sort of "fundamental" of the evolutionary process.
This book's definition of "complexity" is simply the count of types of component. At the upper level of whole ecosystems, this amounts to counting species, in other words to the common concept of "species diversity". Using species diversity as a measure of ecosystems is fairly common. At the lower level of individual organisms, this amounts to counting types of cells. When related to "size", a count of cell types seems little more than a tautology. And I missed the book's grappling with an obvious apparent flaw in this definition: very large organisms, like a sequoia or a whale, contain about the same number of cell types as similar organisms a couple of orders of magnitude smaller. Such large variations in a relation between size and this definition of complexity seem almost fatal to the central focus.
The development of slime molds is described in detail. But a similar description of the development of animals is conspicuously absent. There's no mention of things like blastulas, or the initial cell devisions, or notochord differentiation, or fetal development. There's also no discussion of the importance of chemical gradient signals in development, nothing reminiscent of Alan Turing's pioneering description of the laying down of a tiger's stripes.
As of this writing this book is less that 25 years old, yet it seems "outdated". Partly this is simply because of the huge shifts occasioned by a few recent discoveries. In particular the discovery of regulatory genes that turn other genes on and off demolishes a lot of the arguments in the book. Other possibly relevant recent discoveries, such as DNA methylation or even chaos theory, are of course also not mentioned at all.
Professor Bonner is unquestionably an expert on the development, life cycle, and morphology of slime molds. Books that focus more directly on that topic might provide a better way to avail oneself of his knowledge. Or perhaps some of his newer books address the size problem more adequately.
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