Endless Forms Most Beautiful

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I just finished Sean B. Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo the other day, and I must confess: I was initially a bit disappointed. It has a few weaknesses. For one, I didn’t learn anything new from it; I had already read just about everything mentioned in the book in the original papers. It also takes a very conservative view of evolutionary theory, and doesn’t mention any of the more radical ideas that you find bubbling up on just about every page of Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s big book. One chapter, the tenth, really didn’t fit in well with the rest—the whole book is about pattern, and that chapter is suddenly talking about a few details in the evolution and development of the human brain.

So I read the whole thing with a bit of exasperation, waiting for him to get to the good stuff, and he never did. But then after thinking about it for a while, I realized what the real problem was: he didn’t write book for me, the inconsiderate bastard, he wrote it for all those people who maybe haven’t taken a single course or read any other books in the subject of developmental biology. I skimmed through it again without my prior biases, and realized that it’s actually a darned good survey of basic concepts, and that I’m going to find it very useful.

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Books for the Fall 2007 semester

It’s that time of the summer again, when classes loom all too near, and enthusiastic students start asking for the reading ahead of time so that they can both find the books from a cheaper source than our bookstore and get a jump on the material. So to handle all those requests at once, here is a list of my fall term classes:

  • If you’re an incoming freshman biology major, you’ll be taking Biology 1111, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development (FunGenEvoDevo, for short), either in the fall or the spring term. This course is primarily a qualitative introduction to the basic concepts of the scientific method which will also give you an overview of the fields described in the title. It has two textbooks, but you’ll also be getting some assigned readings from the scientific literature as the term goes on.

    • Science as a Way of Knowing: The Foundations of Modern Biology(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by John A. Moore. This is the primary required text for the course; you may be surprised when you read it, since it doesn’t fit the usual expectations of an introductory biology textbook. We did tell you this was a liberal arts university when you enrolled, though, didn’t we?

    • Life: The Science of Biology(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by David Sadava, H. Craig Heller , Gordon H. Orians, William K. Purves, David M. Hillis. This book is optional, but highly recommended, and will be used as a reference text throughout the course. You can get by using the copies in the reference section of the library, but since this book will also be used in our required biodiversity and cell biology courses, you might as well bite the expensive bullet and get a copy now. The links above are to the 8th and latest edition; it’s fine to use the 7th edition.

  • A smaller number of more advanced students may be taking Biology 4003, Neurobiology. This course will be taught rather more socratically than your usual lecture course, so be prepared for more external readings (and you can also propose your own interests), but there will be one reference text and a couple of general books on the subject that we’ll be reading together.

    • Neurobiology: Molecules, Cells and Systems (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Gary G. Matthews. This is a traditional neuroscience textbooks — you aren’t escaping this term without knowing the Goldman equation and a little anatomy and pharmacology.

    • Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Jonathan Weiner. Why should we care about neuroscience? This book will help you figure it out, and it’s excellent description of the research enterprise might nudge a few of you towards grad school (or scare you off, but either outcome is good.)

    • Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How it Changed the World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Carl Zimmer. We’ve got to at least touch on the history of the field, and this book will give you an fine overview of what people have been thinking about that blob of goo resting in your cranium. Those students planning on med school will also find the perspective here useful.

Feel free to order them ahead of time. Be sure to have them by the first week of classes, though … I tend to plunge in right away with a stack of assignments on the first day!

A New Human

A few years ago, everyone was in a tizzy over the discovery of Flores Man, curious hominin remains found on an Indonesian island that had a number of astonishing features: they were relatively recent, less than 20,000 years old; they were not modern humans, but of unsettled affinity, with some even arguing that they were like australopithecines; and just as weird, they were tiny, a people only about 3 feet tall with a cranial capacity comparable to a chimpanzee’s. This was sensational. Then on top of that, add more controversy with some people claiming that the investigators had it all wrong, and they were looking at pathological microcephalics from an isolated, inbred population, and then there were all kinds of territorial disputes and political showboating going on, with the specimens taken out of the hands of the discoverers, passed off to a distinguished elderly scientist whose lab damaged them, etc., etc., etc. It was a mess of a story, and the basic scientific issues are still unsettled.

Now the leader of the investigators who found the specimens has written a book, A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the “Hobbits” of Flores, Indonesia(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mike Morwood and Penny Van Oosterzee. I’m coming to this a bit late — Afarensis reviewed it already this spring — but finally got far enough down in my pile of books to encounter it.

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The Evolving World

Feeling pragmatic? Is your focus entirely practical, on what works and what will get the job done? Are you one of those fighters for evolutionary biology who waves away all the theory and the abstractions and the strange experimental manipulations, and thinks the best argument for evolution is the fact that it works and is important? This book, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by David Mindell, does make you sit down and learn a little history and philosophy to start off, but the focus throughout is on the application of evolution to the real world. It does a fine job of it, too.

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Storm World

Back when I was a youngling, I read a very exciting series of science-fiction novels called The Deathworld Trilogy, by Harry Harrison. The premise was that there was this horrifically fierce planet in the galaxy, with gravity twice Earth-normal, constantly erupting volcanoes, and savage, ravenous beasts that were out to destroy anything that moves. The humans who settled there became heavily muscled with lightning-fast reflexes and a militaristic society that provided some of the best soldiers in the universe. Now that is the setting for old-school science-fiction.

The genre isn’t dead! I picked up a copy of a book called Storm World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I figured it would be another tale of heroic humans conquering impossible odds in a dangerous setting, this time on a planet rife with ferocious storms. The story provides the storms, alright, but, boy, was I disappointed otherwise: it was the most unbelievable science-fiction novel I’ve ever read.

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A little more on Lifecode

One other thing about Stuart Pivar’s book: he has collected a few endorsements. They are a little strange. One is by Robert Hazen, a chemist, and if you read it, it’s more like a review of a paper in which the reviewer is trying to state some things he finds plausible about the work. In this case, he likes the idea of the fluid-filled plastic models for making “a more rigorous mathematical exploration of the relationships among such variables as length, width, viscosity, forces, and resultant segmented morphology”, which is fair enough. I don’t think Pivar has demonstrated the competence to carry out such a study, and the fundamental flaws in the rest of the work do not justify any confidence in him.

Another endorsement is by Neil deGrasse Tyson. A funny thing…I’ve written to several of the people Pivar cites as supporting his work. Tyson replied, and has said that part of the quote is an out of context reference to a completely different subject, and that another part is a fabrication. He has asked that Pivar remove his name from his website, which he has not done. Tyson’s name is also prominently used on the back cover of his book—I don’t see that going away, either.

Almost two thirds of the book is taken up with copies of articles and book chapters by other authors. I wonder if Pivar got permission from the authors and publishers before using their work wholesale like that?

Lifecode: From egg to embryo by self-organization

As I mentioned before in my review of Stuart Pivar’s LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization, I’m actually sympathetic to the ideas of developmental structuralism. This is the concept that physical, mechanical, and chemical properties make a significant and underappreciated contribution to the acquisition of organismal form; genes are not enough, do not carry a complete specification, and what we have to consider is interactions between genes, environment, and cytoplasm. Good stuff, all of it — and I’d like to see more work done on the subject. In my review, though, I had to point out that Pivar hadn’t actually addressed any biology, and that his modeling was little more than an extended flight of fancy, unanchored by any connection to any embryology.

Now Pivar has put out a new version of his book, Lifecode: From egg to embryo by self-organization. I’m sorry to say it doesn’t address any of my criticisms, and is even worse. This is not a scientific theory, and it isn’t even a collection of evidence: it’s a jumble of doodles. I read through it all this afternoon (there really isn’t that much to read), and I have to conclude it says nothing about the development or evolution of biological organisms, although it is relevant to something else.

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Thank God for Evolution!

Why me, O Lord, why me?

One of the more recent books sent to me is Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Michael Dowd. I have read it, and I’m feeling biblical.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
Psalm 22:1

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Middle World

One of the traditional ways to explain a scientific subject is the historical approach: start at the beginning of the endeavor and explain why people asked the questions they did, how they answered them, and how each answer blossomed into new potential. It’s a popular way of teaching science, too, because it emphasizes the process that leads to new discovery. Middle World: The Restless Heart of Matter and Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Haw, exemplifies the technique. Not only is it effective, but this one slim book manages to begin with a simple, curious observation in 1827 and ends up synthesizing many of the major ideas of modern physics, chemistry, and biology!

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