Review of Evo-Devo book
Michael Ruse reviews 'Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo
and the Making of the Animals', by Sean B. Carroll, in today's Globe and Mail.
From the article:
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Evolution today is highly controversial, particularly in the United States,
where there are ongoing battles about whether it should be taught in schools.
Yet, when Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, very many
people in Britain, in Europe and even on this side of the Atlantic at once
agreed that all living organisms, including us humans, are the end results of a
long, slow process of natural development, from very simple forms, perhaps even
originally from inorganic substances. A major reason why Darwin was so
effective was that he showed that the idea of evolution explains so many
different things: paleontology, geographical distributions, anatomy and more.
One area covered by Darwin was embryology, the development of the individual
organism from conception to adulthood. Organisms are basically alike in their
earliest stages and then diverge along different pathways. Darwin was always
very proud that he could show that this is all a matter of evolution,
especially evolution by his own mechanism of natural selection, where only the
fittest survive and pass on their features to subsequent generations. Darwin's
point was that the earliest stages of development show shared origins, and
adult diversity occurs -- and only occurs -- because natural selection works on
organisms to fit them for different adult conditions and environments and
lifestyles.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/200504...
or http://tinyurl.com/cbvmk
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