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Developmental Plasticity and Evolution Mary Jane West-Eberhard |
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"For the past
century, evolutionary biology has focused exclusively on the ways in which
genes and traits are propagated or lost, and has had surprisingly little to
say about how new traits originate. In this masterful book, West-Eberhard provides a detailed explanation of how the
origins of novelty can be understood in the light of recent insights from
development, physiology, and behavior. This is a book of immense scope, full
of interesting and exciting biology, in which West-Eberhard
shows that the origins of novelty are both diverse and infinitely more
interesting than what can be provided by random mutation. It will cause many
to see evolution with completely new eyes and may prove to be the most
important and insightful book about evolution since The Origin of Species.
" Fred Nijhout,
Professor of Biology, |
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Mary Jane West-Eberhard is a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute whose primary research is on the natural history
and behavior of social wasps. She studied zoology at the |