Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo 1st Edition

by Sean B. Carroll (Author)

109 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0393060164

ISBN-10: 0393060160

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Share <Embed>

Condition: Used - Good

In Stock. Sold by Brilliant-Buy, Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

52 Used from $4.99

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Deliver to France

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Ships from and sold by BOBookstore.

This item does not ship to France. Please check other sellers who may ship internationally.

15 New from $45.87

Deliver to France

$26.08

Turn on 1-Click ordering

More Buying Choices

15 New from $45.87 52 Used from $4.99 4 Collectible from $24.95

71 used & new from $4.99

See All Buying Options

Free Two-Day Shipping for College Students with Amazon Student

What Brian Greene did for string theory, Sean Carroll―a leading biologist―does for Evo Devo.

Evo Devo is evolutionary developmental biology, the third revolution in evolutionary biology. The first was marked by the publication of The Origin of Species. The second occurred in the early twentieth century, when Darwin's theories were merged with the study of genetics. Now the insights of Evo Devo are astonishing the biology world by showing how the endless forms of animals―butterflies and zebras, trilobites and dinosaurs, apes and humans, are made and evolved.

Perhaps the most surprising finding of Evo Devo is the discovery that a small number of primitive genes led to the formation of fundamental organs and appendages in all animal forms. The gene that causes humans to form arms and legs is the same gene that causes birds and insects to form wings, and fish to form fins; similarly, one ancient gene has led to the creation of eyes across the animal kingdom. Changes in the way this ancient tool kit of genes is used have created all the diversity that surrounds us.

Sean Carroll is the ideal author to lead the curious on this intellectual adventure―he is the acknowledged leader of the field, and his seminal discoveries have been featured in Time and The New York Times. 16 pages of color and 100 black-and-white illustrations

Frequently bought together

+

Total price: $47.99

These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Show details

Buy the selected items together

This item:Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll Hardcover $26.08
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Ships from and sold by BOBookstore.
$3.99 shipping
The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll Hardcover $21.91
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Sean B. Carroll

105

Hardcover
47 offers from $2.51
Sean B. Carroll

84

Hardcover
$21.91
Sean Carroll

403

Hardcover
$15.61
Siddhartha Mukherjee

884

Hardcover
$16.66
Neil Shubin

570

Hardcover
$20.76
Sean B. Carroll

105

Paperback
$12.11

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Page 1 of 1Start overPage 1 of 1

Feedback

Michael Matthews

This book has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever. Will you be next?

1533

Kindle Edition
$7.99
Feedback

Jeremy Griffith

148

Paperback
$20.66
Feedback

Michael Matthews

This book has helped thousands of guys build their best bodies ever. Will you be next?

3380

Kindle Edition
$7.73
Feedback

Lygia V Pereira

1

Paperback
$18.00
Feedback

John H. Walton

269

Paperback
$12.96
Feedback

Frank Suarez

125

Paperback
$18.05
Feedback

Paul Knoepfler

22

Kindle Edition
$12.89

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Every animal form is the product of two processes--development from an egg and evolution from its ancestors," writes Sean B. Carroll in his introduction to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. The new science of "evo devo"--or evolutionary developmental biology--examines the relationships between those two processes, embryonic development and evolutionary changes, despite their radically different time scales. Carroll first offers a recap of how genes express themselves in a growing embryo, then peers into the life histories of real-life examples to explain how those genes have changed (or not changed) over millions of years of evolution. Paraphrasing Thomas Huxley, he asks us to consider evolution and development as two sides of the same coin.

We may marvel at the process of an egg becoming an adult, but we accept it as an everyday fact. It is merely then a lack of imagination to fail to grasp how changes in this process that assimilated over long periods of time, far longer than the span of human experience, shape life's diversity."

The book's second half is where Carroll really gets at the meat of evo devo, explaining how regulatory genes control such mysteries as individual and population changes in butterfly's spots, jaguar fur, and hominid skulls. Evo devo is one of the hottest areas of study in 21st-century biology, and Carroll's outline of the field is a great place to start understanding it. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

Cobb County textbook stickers aside, evolutionary natural selection offers a pretty straightforward explanation for the forward march of species through history; a mutation that better equips a given organism to survive is passed along to its heirs, becoming more common as successive generations flourish. The actual process by which mutations happen, however, was far more mysterious until scientists turned to the study of evolutionary development (known by the somewhat unfortunate moniker "Evo Devo"). One such scientist is Carroll, a genetics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who guides us along the broad contours of development ("the process through which a single-celled egg gives rise to a complex, multibillion-celled animal") and the ways in which its study sheds light on the underlying mechanisms of evolution. He explains in concrete terms how small changes in a species's genetic code of a given species can lead to dramatic differences in physiology is the "missing piece" of evolutionary theory, Carroll argues. The book is as much a salvo in the continuing battles between creationists and evolutionists as it is a popularization of science, and Carroll combines clear writing with the deep knowledge gained from a lifetime of genetics research, first laying out the principles of evolutionary development and then showing us how they can explain both the progression of species in the fossil record and outliers like a six-fingered baseball pitcher. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (April 17, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393060160
ISBN-13: 978-0393060164
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.3 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 109 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #667,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #107 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diseases & Physical Ailments > Genetic
- #141 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology
- #1576 in Books > Textbooks > Science & Mathematics > Biology & Life Sciences > Biology

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Be the first video

Your name here

Important information

Ingredients

Example Ingredients

Directions

Example Directions

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Page 1 of 1Start overPage 1 of 1

Feedback

John H. Walton

269

Paperback
$12.96
Feedback

Paperback
$48.00
Feedback

Andrew Liddle

10

Paperback
$35.53
Feedback

Jeremy Griffith

148

Paperback
$20.66
Feedback

Paul Knoepfler

22

Kindle Edition
$12.89
Feedback

Lygia V Pereira

1

Paperback
$18.00
Feedback

Jeremy Griffith

28

Paperback
$9.95

Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features:

See Kindle Edition

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars

1 star (0%)

Write a customer review

See all 109 customer reviews

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Stephen E. Witham

Turns out it IS blueprints

March 14, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The story and implications of the work that led to evo-devo are amazing, but other reviewers here cover that. I want to summarize the algorithm I pieced together from Carroll's not-entirely-step-by-step discussion.

It turns out, counter to what biologists thought for most of the 20th Century, that our genomes really are a lot like blueprints. We thought that there's no easy mapping from a gene to a body part or detail at some spot on the body. But there often is. We thought that the genes specify the process of embryogenesis, not a picture of the final product, and that's true, but the process has a lot to do with identifying locations and things to go in locations. The "toolkit" that Carroll talks about is a system common to all multicelled animals for laying out maps and allocating places on those maps for parts, then (recursively) laying out maps interior to the parts and allocating space for subparts, and so on. As if, at each stage, you had bosses and sub-bosses reading from blueprints and sub-blueprints to surveyors and builders.

This is done with chemical signal gradients and the switches that turn genes on and off based on combinations of signals and cell states. All of this happens as the ground on which the work is happening is expanding exponentially, so that although the signals operate over similar ranges, if a signal is put out earlier in the growth process it influences what finally becomes a larger part. Carroll emphasizes that this means parts' sizes can be varied by varying when their formation triggers. Another effect is when, over the course of evolution, a controlling gene becomes duplicated, the the original and variant genes evolve to trigger at different locations, and then the two duplicate parts can specialize differently while still sharing most of their code.

There is an alternation between the activation of signals for body parts-- like head, thorax, tail, then later eye, leg, heart-- and setting up gradients that identify locations in a space, like toward the torso vs. out toward the extremities. At first you identify north, south, east and west, and then New York, DC, Seattle, LA, Miami, Chicago identify themselves, then the grids around the cities, then named neighborhoods within those grids, and so on. If you think of an individual final cell, it (and the ancestor cells it split form) learns step by step the details that customize it: first it's in the Northeast, then it's a New Yorker, then slightly to the southeast of Manhattan, then in Brooklyn... the center... Park Slope... top of the hill... until it's the assistant to the owner of a flower shop across from the park.

Something I thought was missing: how do reaction-diffusion processes and/or mutual-inhibition fit into this process? They seem necessary for cells (and groups of cells) to make definite decisions about what to be, where a sharp edge is, for there to be a single center for a part, and so forth. It seems to be either left out because the relation to evo-devo isn't well-studied, or touched on in an earlier section of the book but not fit into the general summary.

Something that seemed important that I want to pay attention to on my second reading: why are strings of HOX genes in the same order along the DNA that the corresponding parts are along the body? It was emphasized in the story of their discovery but I forget how they ended up that way evolutionarily, and how it figures into the way they play out in development.

7 people found this helpful

Comment

So I like to tweak racist by pointing out our ancestors the ...

April 11, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Wow, So I like to tweak racist by pointing out our ancestors the original humans were black and so we are all descendants of the black race. However, this book points out that we share common building blocks and are who we are based on the actions of genes and proteins we share with all animals in the kingdom including insects. Science rules truth rules.

2 people found this helpful

Comment

Interesting Research in Developmental Biology

July 20, 2011

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book provides an interesting discussion of the concept of Evo Devo or evolutionary developmental biology. This is my first exposure to this science and it provided me with a good introduction to the subject.

According to Carroll, Evo Devo is like a third major act in a continuing evolutionary synthesis. He states it provides a critical missing piece of Modern Synthesis - embryology. This is integrated with the molecular genetics and the traditional elements such as paleontology.

Carroll speaks of the story of evolution in three acts: I) the work of Darwin, II) Modern Synthesis which unified three disciplines and III) Evo Devo.

I gathered from the text that two key components of Evo Devo are switches and the tool kit. In brief:

Switches:

The key to diversity in animal life results from the astronomical combination of regulatory inputs and switches. How genes express themselves is determined by these "switches" that regulate or modulate the gene's expression in an organism. One gene may be regulated by many separate switches such that the gene is used many times and in different places. An average size switch is usually several hundred base pairs of DNA long. Within this span there may be anywhere from a half dozen to twenty or more signature sequences for several different proteins produced by the expressed gene.

Tool Kit:

We have tool kit genes. Despite their great differences in appearance and physiology, all complex animals share a common "tool kit" or "master" genes that govern the formation and patterning of their bodies and body parts. The tool kit genes have a multifunctionality that stems from their deployment at different times and places (e.g., a different body segment) in the organism. Also, common to all living descendents since prior to the Cambrian, are Hox genes which are developmental control genes involved in establishing the front to rear axis and the identity of each body segment in organisms. The fact that these Hox genes and other tool kit genes have been preserved for hundreds of millions of years demonstrate the pressures to maintain these proteins over the course of evolutionary history. The bilaterian (animals having a bilateral symmetry) tool kit predated the Cambrian, the mammalian tool kit predated the rapid diversification of animals in the Paleogene, and the human tool kit predated the apes and other primates.

I found the whole concept of Evo Devo fascinating, and I can see how this work on the embryological/ genetic level can assist us in coming to a better understanding of the origins of life. And that's what I want - to better understand how it all happened. I would recommend this book as an addition to the library of anyone who is interested in the origins of life.

2 people found this helpful

Comment

Evolutionary Science at its Finest

March 26, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is an amazing book written in plain English but with a depth of scientific knowledge you often don't get in many "popular science" books. He does a beautiful job of explaining how evolution has built complex organisms, including humans, from the simplest subset of genes that he refers to as the "Toolkit". These foundational genes, made to act in numerous ways by "switches" located further up the strand of DNA, build all the beauty and wonder you see in the world today. Truly a fascinating book and a must read for anyone interested in the biological sciences!

3 people found this helpful

Comment

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Sean B. Carroll

84

Paperback
$15.25
Scott F. Gilbert

20

Hardcover
$123.96
Sean B. Carroll

105

Paperback
$12.11
Sean Carroll

403

Paperback
$13.63
Neil Shubin

570

Paperback
$12.91
Shirley J. Wright

9

Loose Leaf
$70.33

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: animal genetics

English United States

Conditions of Use
Privacy Notice
Interest-Based Ads
© 1996-2018, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates