Description
Constable and Robinson, Octavo, paperback, black and white photographs.
$20.00
Presenting Charles Darwin’s garden, this title offers a portrait of the formation of one of England’s greatest thinkers and his relationship with the place he loved and shows how his experiments that he conducted over 150 years ago are revealing fresh proofs and revelations as we continue to search for the origins of life.
Constable and Robinson, Octavo, paperback, black and white photographs.
Weight | 250 g |
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This sumptuous large-format book was first produced in 2009 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Charles Darwin Foundation on Galapagos. The book comprises a series of invited essays under the editorship of world-renowned photographer and long-term Galapagos resident, Tui de Roy, who has also provided most of the photographs. The authoritative essays cover the entire spectrum of Galapagos wildlife including the marine environment, unique vegetation such as sunflower trees as well as wildlife including giant tortoises, marine iguanas, sea lions and the Galapagos finches that inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution. This new edition has significant updates to a number of chapters including brand new photography and information about scientific developments elsewhere and a new jacket.
Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five hundred million years ago. As bewilderingly diverse then as the beetle is today, they survived in the arctic or the tropics, were spiky or smooth, were large as lobsters or small as fleas. And because they flourished for three hundred million years, they can be used to glimpse a less evolved world of ancient continents and vanished oceans. Erudite and entertaining, this book is a uniquely exuberant homage to a fabulously singular species.
The mystery of inheritance has captivated thinkers since antiquity, and the unlocking of this mystery – the development of classical genetics – is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. This great scientific and human drama is the story told fully and for the first time in this book. Acclaimed science writer James Schwartz presents the history of genetics through the eyes of a dozen or so central players, beginning with Charles Darwin and ending with Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller. In tracing the emerging idea of the gene, Schwartz deconstructs many often-told stories that were meant to reflect glory on the participants and finds that the ‘official’ version of discovery often hides a far more complex and illuminating narrative. The discovery of the structure of DNA and the more recent advances in genome science represent the culmination of one hundred years of concentrated inquiry into the nature of the gene.
Schwartz’s multifaceted training as a mathematician, geneticist, and writer enables him to provide a remarkably lucid account of the development of the central ideas about heredity, and at the same time bring to life the brilliant and often eccentric individuals who shaped these ideas. In the spirit of the late Stephen Jay Gould, this book offers a thoroughly engaging story about one of the oldest and most controversial fields of scientific inquiry. It offers readers the background they need to understand the latest findings in genetics and those still to come in the search for the genetic basis of complex diseases and traits.
Are chimps almost human? Are we just smarter chimps? What does that oft-quoted 1.6% difference in DNA actually mean? As teams worldwide seek the genetic basis of our humanity, a complex picture is emerging. Small changes in key genes can cause big ones in brains, bodies and behaviour. We’ve changed profoundly since the chimp-human split.