Evolution category: 1570 books

The discovery of the first species of African hominin, Australopithecus africanus, from Taung, South Africa in 1924, launched the study of fossil man in Africa. New discoveries continue to confirm the importance of this region to our understanding of human evolution. Outlining major developments since...

This book puts multilevel selection theory into a much needed historical perspective. This is achieved by discussing multilevel selection in the first half of the twentieth century, the reasons for the energetic rejection of Wynne-Edwards’ group selectionist stance in the 1960s, Elisabeth Lloyd’s...

Illuminating the processes and patterns that link genotype to phenotype, epigenetics seeks to explain features, characters, and developmental mechanisms that can only be understood in terms of interactions that arise above the level of the gene. With chapters written by leading authorities, this volume...

Picture a world of dog-sized scorpions and millipedes as long as a car; tropical rainforests with trees towering over 150 feet into the sky and a giant polar continent five times larger than Antarctica. That world was not imaginary; it was the earth more than 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous...

In 1994, Luca Cavalli-Sforza publishes The History and Geography of Human Genes, using phenotypic markers such as blood antigens. Now, decades later, the techniques for sequencing the human genome have dramatically improved. So has mathematical modeling. David Reich, geneticist at Harvard Medical...

Neotropical Biogeography: Regionalization and Evolution presents the most comprehensive single-source treatment of the Neotropical region derived from evolutionary biogeographic studies. The book provides a biogeographic regionalization based on distributional patterns of plant and animal taxa, discusses...

Evolutionary biomechanics is the study of evolution through the analysis of biomechanical systems. Its unique advantage is the precision with which physical constraints and performance can be predicted from first principles. Instead of reviewing the entire breadth of the biomechanical literature,...

Renowned paleoartist John Gurche brings the traditional techniques of figure drawing and anatomical art to the portrayal of our hominin ancestors. The result is a visual record of the evolving human form that feels alive in a way no scientific illustration could match. While science provides an underpinning...

Since the 1980s, a renewed understanding of molecular development has afforded an unprecedented level of knowledge of the mechanisms by which phenotype in animals and plants has evolved. In this volume, top scientists in these fields provide perspectives on how molecular data in biology help to elucidate...

This update to the award-winning The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence covers the most accepted common theories concerning the emergence of modern Homo sapiens—adding fresh insight from top young scholars on the key new discoveries of the past 25 years. The Origins...

This volume explains the key ideas, questions and methods involved in studying the hidden world of vibrational communication in animals. The authors dispel the notion that this form of communication is difficult to study and show how vibrational signaling is a key to social interactions in species...

Wie Wolfgang Wickler in seinem kurzen, kompakten und seit seinem erstmaligem Erscheinen im Jahr 1967 immer noch aktuellen Werk zeigt, strebt die vergleichende Verhaltensforschung danach, charakteristische Verhaltensmerkmale und Fähigkeiten von Tieren und Menschen zu beschreiben und zu dokumentieren....

The past ten years have brought major changes in our concepts of the structuring properties of liquid water. First: water molecules in the liquid state no longer are considered bonded to four others - high-speed neutron irradiation as well as molecular orbital calculations have provided evidence that...

Flies (Dipteria) have had an important role in deepening scientists'understanding of modern biology and evolution. The study of flies has figured prominently in major advances in the fields of molecular evolution, physiology, genetics, phylogenetics, and ecology over the last century. This volume,...