Everybody Out of the Pond

At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us.

We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago.

In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.

James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) was one of American psychology's greatest contributors, both professionally and intellectually. Professionally, he founded experimental laboratories at the Universities of Toronto and Princeton, established two important journals: The Psychological Review and The Psychological Bulletin, and served as President of the American Psychological Association. Intellectually, Baldwin was one of the field's most prolific authors and quite possibly its most sophisticated thinker. Over the course of his career, he published twenty-two books and approximately one-hundred-fifty articles. Among his publications were the field's first well-controlled experimental studies of infant behavior and a work, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development. Between 1901 and 1905 he edited a three volume Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology that is still one of the best sources for turn-of-the-century thought in these disciplines. This led directly to his receiving Oxford University's first honorary doctorate of science. Baldwin's biosocial approach introduced a level of complexity in conceptualization of the mind, its evolutionary origins, ontogenetic development, and sociocultural formation that went far beyond the prevailing thought of the period. He addressed topics as varied as the nature of developmental and evolutionary mechanisms, the relationship between reason and reality, the genesis of logic, the value of aesthetic experience, and the nature and development in children of habit, imitation, creative invention, altruism, egoism, morality, social suggestibility, social self, self-awareness, theory of mind, and enculturation. His use and in some cases introduction of concepts such as multiplicity of self, ideal self, self-esteem, assimilation, accommodation, primary circular reaction, genetic logic, genetic epistemology, and social heredity exerted a formative influence on later scholars such as George Herbert Mead, Jean Piaget, Lev S. Vygotsky, and Lawrence Kohlberg. In Development and Evolution, Baldwin had arrived at a clear conception of the mechanism mediating the influence of individual adaptations on the course of phylogenetic evolution. As he described it in an autobiographical chapter written toward the end of his life, the theory of organic selection involved the claim that: "natural selection operating on "spontaneous variations" is sufficient alone to produce determinate evolution (without the inheritance of acquired adaptations or modifications), since - and this is the new point - in each generation variations in the direction of, or "coincident" with, the function to be developed will favor the organisms possessing them, and their descendants will profit by the accumulation of such variations. Thus the function will gradually come to perfection. In other words, the individual organism's accommodations, made through learning, effort, adaptation, etc., while not physically inherited, still act to supplement or screen the congenital endowment during its incomplete stages, and so give the species time to build up its variations in determinate lines." This title is increasingly heavily cited because of the great interest in how development is represented genetically and how changes in gene expression during development, especially regulatory genes, occur through selection on phenotypes

The richly fossiliferous Neogene stratigraphic sections of the Dominican Republic serve as one of only a few geological research systems in the world where morphological stasis and punctuated speciation have been investigated in multiple lineages. This research system provides unprecedented opportunities for comparative studies of evolutionary stasis and change and their environmental and ecological contexts. In this volume, a diverse group of geologists and paleobiologists collectively focus their attention on this research system, providing an updated geological framework and a series of novel studies of evolutionary stasis and change among different lineages and associated ecological communities. This collection of studies illustrates the immense potential of collaborative, multidisciplinary, and field-based paleobiological research for studies of macroevolutionary change in the fossil record.

This book explores the nature of cultural and culturally structured social and behavioral entities, their evolutionary interactions, and the central role purposive behaviors play in those interactions. It, first, makes the case for cultural and cultural structured systems being considered as true entities bounded in time and space, and not ephemera in a constant state of becoming another system. Second, it examines how these entities interact to produce evolutionary culture change. It then argues that the intent of purposive behaviors is reliably knowable in the aggregate, at least when dealing with expressions of behavioral tendencies in the animal kingdom, humans included. Finally, the book references well documented behavioral tendencies for examples of proximate causation in the evolution of settled village societies and, following that, socially complex societies. Through these efforts, the book synthesizes the various approaches to the evolution of culture and provides a complete and comprehensive picture of the process. It provides a corrective to the tendency to view cultural systems as entirely open ended and as capable of changing in any direction; and also to treating cultural evolution as solely a result of selective forces, that is, in terms of only ultimate causation. This book provides an engaging and critical counterview to established theories of cultural evolution and is of interest to scholars and students of different disciplines, from anthropology and archeology, to evolutionary biology and epigenetics.

The essays in this collection explore the implications that the growing challenge from "evolutionary" concepts of human nature have in various policyareas and show what must be done to ensure that policies conform to humanbehavior and its limits for change. As our conceptualizations of humanbehavior switch from one that says human behavior is a product of culture(through learning and socialization) to one that claims that behavior isthe outcome of both cultyre and genetics and biology, it is necessary for public policy to change as well. The contributors in this volume examine what happens when it is no longer possible to base policy solely on the basis ofculturally-constructed human behavior. Many argue that to ignore "nature" onbehalf of "nurture" will result in incomplete solutions to social, political, and economic problems.

This book has the modest aim of bringing together methodological, theo- retical, and empirical studies that bear on the phylogenetic placement of primates and their relatives, and continues a tradition started by Phylogeny of the Primates: A Multidisciplinary Approach (edited by W. P. Luckett and F. S. Szalay; Plenum Press, 1975) and The Comparative Biology and Evolutionary Rela- tionships of Tree Shrews (edited by W. P. Luckett, Plenum Press, 1980). Although there are several recent compendia of studies of primate relationships, most of these are exclusively concerned with the internal arrangement of clades within the order, not with the place of primates and their relatives on the eutherian cladogram. Evolutionary theory predicts that primates must be more closely related to some non primate mammals than to others, but a continuing problem has been to find reliable procedures for recovering historical relationships among taxa. Before the 1970s, higher-level relationships among primates and euthe- rian mammals that might be closely related to them were rarely treated in detail. Outstanding exceptions, like Le Gros Clark's Antecedents of Man, were just that-exceptions. (Clark himself essentially stopped with making a case for tree shrews; he did not, for example, explore whether bats and colugos were also related to primates. ) In the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of cladistic techniques and advances in molecular methods began to transform primate systematics.

A major thrust of scientific concern in recent years has been the problems of documenting and conserving biodiversity and the establishment of systems of sustainable development. We do not even know approximately how many species in different groups of living organisms share the planet with us! The major aim of this volume is to review the practical application of species concepts and appropriate technologies for as wide a diversity as possible of living organisms.

In the mid- to late-twentieth century, large scientific conflicts flared in two seemingly distinct fields of scientific inquiry. In bioenergetics, which examines how organisms obtain and utilize energy, the chemiosmotic hypothesis of Mitchell suggested a novel mechanism for energy conversion. In evolutionary biology, meanwhile, Wynne Edwards strongly articulated the view that organisms may act for the "good of the group." This work crystalized a long history of imprecise thinking about the evolution of cooperation. While both controversies have received ample attention, no one has ever suggested that one might inform the other, i.e., that energy metabolism in general and chemiosmosis in particular might be relevant to the evolution of cooperation. The central idea is nevertheless remarkably simple. Chemiosmosis rapidly converts energy, and once storage capacity is exceeded, an overabundance of product has various negative consequences. While to some extent chemiosmotic processes can be modulated, under certain circumstances it is also possible to simply disperse the products into the environment. This book argues that these two heretofore distinct scientific disciplines are connected, thereby suggesting that a ubiquitous process of energy conversion may underlie the evolution of cooperation and link major transitions in the history of life that have been regarded as mechanistically unrelated.

This volume consists of papers written by evolutionary, molecular and organismal biologists, geneticists, ecologists, behavioural ecologists, morphologists, mathematicians, theoreticians and experimentalists, in honour of Professor Eviatar (Eibi) Nevo on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The contributors are only a small subset of Eibi's many friends, collaborators and students (not that one can distinguish these categories among Eibi's colleagues). His widespread influence and activity, both in Israel and more generally, as a leading evolutionary biologist is indicated by his many co-authors on books and papers, and by his many students integrated in teaching and research. This volume presents some of the most recent dramatic results of molecular, genomic, and organismal evolutionary processes. It represents analyses, experiments, observations, reviews, discussions and forecasts of evolutionary theory comprising both novel methods and results, reanalyzed and reviewed data sets based on comparative, experimental, and theoretical studies utilizing model organisms across phylogeny, including bacteria, fungi, plants, animals and humans. It elucidates the revolution in molecular biology that ushered in our understanding of the evolutionary process over time and space. The topics discussed include major problems of evolutionary theory concerning origins, phylogeny, relative importance of evolutionary forces, structure and function, adaptation and speciation in space and time in changing and stressful environments. A major emerging generalization is the nonrandomness of genome structure highlighting the importance of natural selection as a major organizing evolutionary force not onlyat the phenotypic level, but most importantly at the interlinked genotypic molecular level. The integration between the molecular and organismal levels unifies life which is subjected to the mechanism of natural selection as a major orienting evolutionary force.

The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic explores a pivotal conceptual moment in the history of evolutionary theory: the development of its extensive reliance on a wide array of concepts of chance. It tells the history of a methodological and conceptual development that reshaped our approach to natural selection over a century, ranging from Darwin's earliest notebooks in the 1830s to the early years of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s. Far from being a "pompous parade of arithmetic," as one early critic argued, evolution transformed during this period to make these conceptual and technical tools indispensable. This book charts the role of chance in evolutionary theory from its beginnings to the earliest days of modern evolutionary theory, making it an ideal resource for evolutionary biologists, historians, philosophers, and researchers in science studies or biological statistics.

This book addresses the differentiation control of skeletal muscle in different locations of the vertebrate body Particular attention is paid to novel regulatory molecules and signals as well as the heterogeneity of origin that have revealed a developmental overlap between skeletal and cardiac muscle. Different functional muscle groups are the product of the evolution of the vertebrate classes, making a phylogenetic comparison worthwhile for understanding the role of muscle stem cells and precursors in myogenesis. New insights into the hierarchy of transcription factors, particularly in the context of these different muscle groups have been gained from detailed investigations of the spatio-temporal and regulatory relationships derived from mouse and zebrafish genetics and avian microsurgery. Importantly, epigenetic mechanisms that have surfaced recently, in particular the role of MyomiRs, are also surveyed. With an eye to the human patient, encouraging results have been generated that identify parallels between embryonic myogenesis and regenerating myofibers due to common regulatory molecules. On the other hand, both processes differ considerably in quality and complexity of the processes employed. Interestingly, the heterogeneity in embryonic sources from which skeletal muscle groups in the vertebrate including the human body take origin is paralleled by differences in their susceptibility to particular muscle dystrophies as well as by the characteristics of the satellite cells involved in regeneration. The progress that has been made in the field of muscle stem cell biology, with special focus on the satellite cells, is outlined in this book by experts in the field. The authors review recent insights of the heterogeneous nature of these satellite cells regarding their gene signatures and regeneration potential. Furthermore, an improved understanding of muscle stem cells seems only possible when we study the impact of the cell environment on efficient stem cell replacement therapies for muscular dystrophies, putting embryological findings from different vertebrate classes and stem cell approaches into context.

Asexual reproduction is found in many taxonomic groups and considerable effort has been directed by biologists towards understanding its mechanisms, evolution and ecological significance. This research monograph, which is the culmination of several years of research by the author, offers a though-provoking contribution to this debate. It is primarily aimed at biologists undertaking research into the evolution, genetic control and ecological costs and benefits of different patterns of reproduction, although it should also be of interest to senior undergraduates.

In this book, a case study of a humanistic reading of an essential evolutionary theorist, George C. Williams (May 12, 1926-September 8, 2010), the author contends that certain classic works of evolutionary theory and history are the most important nature writing of recent times. What it means to be scientifically literate-is essential for humanistic scholars, who must ground themselves with literary reading of scientific texts. As the most influential American evolutionary theorist of the second half of the twentieth century, Williams masters critique, frames questions about adaptation and natural selection, and answers in a plain, aphoristic writing style. Williams aims for parsimony-to "recognize adaptation at the level necessitated by the facts and no higher"-through a minimalist writing style. This voice articulates a powerful process that operates at very low levels by blind and selfish chance at the expense of its designed products, using purely trial and error.

A growing body of evidence from the sciences suggests that our moral beliefs have an evolutionary basis. To explain how human morality evolved, some philosophers have called for the study of morality to be naturalized, i.e., to explain it in terms of natural causes by looking at its historical and biological origins. The present literature has focused on the link between evolution and moral realism: if our moral beliefs enhance fitness, does this mean they track moral truths? In spite of the growing empirical evidence, these discussions tend to remain high-level: the mere fact that morality has evolved is often deemed enough to decide questions in normative and meta-ethics. This volume starts from the assumption that the details about the evolution of morality do make a difference, and asks how. It presents original essays by authors from various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, developmental psychology, and primatology, who write in conversation with neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive psychology.

When and how did the brains of our hominin ancestors become human minds? When and why did our capacity for language or art, music and dance evolve? It is the contention of this pathbreaking and provocative book that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social groups, and to maintain social relations over ever-greater distances - the ability to `think big' - that drove the enlargement of the human brain and the development of the human mind. This `social brain hypothesis', put forward by evolutionary psychologists such as Robin Dunbar, one of the authors of this book, can be tested against archaeological and fossil evidence, as archaeologists Clive Gamble and John Gowlett show in the second part of Thinking Big. Along the way, the three authors touch on subjects as diverse and diverting as the switch from finger-tip grooming to vocal grooming or the crucial importance of making fire for the lengthening of the social day. As this remarkable book shows, it seems we still inhabit social worlds that originated deep in our evolutionary past - by the fireside, in the hunt and on the grasslands of Africa.

This book represents an evolutionary approach to defense mechanisms of all living organisms. The results achieved in developmental and comparative immunology are among the most interesting data in immunology. These results have great impact on our understanding fundamental problems of the pathology of the human immune system. At the same time, the field of evolutionary immunology provides not only inspiration for further investigation in biomedicine, but also a number of results applicable in clinical and commercial practice.

This book evaluates the advantages and limitations of studying the development of defense reactions. In addition to reviewing the major and crucial achievements of the past, the book offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art treatise focused primarily on the latest experiments described in the last few years.

Origins: Genesis, Evolution and Biodiversity of Microbial Life in the Universe is the sixth unit of the book series Cellular Origins, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology (COLE) edited by Joseph Seckbach. In this book forty eminent scientists review their studies in the fields of Life from the beginning to the "Fact of Life." The history of Origin of Life and Astrobiology is well covered by these authors. Reviews cover the standard and alternative scenarios of the genesis of Life, while the chapters of "The First Cells" leading to the biodiversity and extremophiles of microbial Life. Among these extremophiles are the microbes living in the Life's limits, such as in high temperature, psychrophilic, UV radiation, and halophilic environments. The origin and history of Martian water is discussed followed by the possible biogeochemistry inside Titan. This new field of Astrobiology has been presented, from comets as a source of materials and Life on earth to the space for last Frontiers.

Exploring Animal Behavior in Laboratory and Field, Second Edition provides a comprehensive manual on animal behavior lab activities. This new edition brings together basic research and methods, presenting applications and problem-solving techniques. It provides all the details to successfully run designed activities while also offering flexibility and ease in setup. The exercises in this volume address animal behavior at all levels, describing behavior, theory, application and communication. Each lab provides details on how to successfully run the activity while also offering flexibility to instructors. This is an important resource for students educators, researchers and practitioners who want to explore and study animal behavior. The field of animal behavior has changed dramatically in the past 15 - 20 years, including a greater use and availability of technology and statistical analysis. In addition, animal behavior has taken on a more applied role in the last decade, with a greater emphasis on conservation and applied behavior, hence the necessity for new resources on the topic.

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology, Four Volume Set is the definitive go-to reference in the field of evolutionary biology. It provides a fully comprehensive review of the field in an easy to search structure. Under the collective leadership of fifteen distinguished section editors, it is comprised of articles written by leading experts in the field, providing a full review of the current status of each topic. The articles are up-to-date and fully illustrated with in-text references that allow readers to easily access primary literature. While all entries are authoritative and valuable to those with advanced understanding of evolutionary biology, they are also intended to be accessible to both advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Broad topics include the history of evolutionary biology, population genetics, quantitative genetics; speciation, life history evolution, evolution of sex and mating systems, evolutionary biogeography, evolutionary developmental biology, molecular and genome evolution, coevolution, phylogenetic methods, microbial evolution, diversification of plants and fungi, diversification of animals, and applied evolution.