By Richard Fortey
ISBN-10: 0307957411
ISBN-13: 9780307957412
From one of many world’s best ordinary scientists and the acclaimed writer of Trilobite!, existence: A ordinary background of 4 Billion Years of lifestyles on Earth and Dry Storeroom No. 1 comes a desirable chronicle of life’s heritage instructed now not throughout the fossil list yet throughout the tales of organisms that experience survived, nearly unchanged, all through time. Evolution, it kind of feels, has no longer thoroughly obliterated its tracks as extra complicated organisms have advanced; the heritage of existence in the world is much older—and odder—than many folks notice.
Scattered around the globe, those striking vegetation and animals proceed to mark seminal occasions in geological time. From a moonlit seashore in Delaware, the place the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its solution to a frenzy of mass mating simply because it did 450 million years in the past, to the dense rainforests of latest Zealand, the place the elusive, unprepossessing velvet malicious program has burrowed deep into rotting trees on the grounds that ahead of the breakup of the traditional supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian beach with stromatolite formations that endure witness to the Precambrian sunrise, the lifestyles of those survivors deals us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal issues in evolutionary heritage. those will not be “living fossils” yet quite a handful of tenacious creatures of days long past.
Written in buoyant, gleaming prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously beautiful exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the superior of technological know-how writing with an explorer’s feel of event and sweetness.
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Extra resources for Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind
Example text
If acquired characteristics could be transmitted to offspring, then it might be possible to raise the mental and moral status of lowly immigrants through education, and those improvements would be passed on to future generations congenitally. And then James Mark Baldwin, the Baldwin Effect, Organic Selection. . 41 they could be improved further, which would in turn be passed on again, and so on, until the descendants were indistinguishable from Americans of northern-European stock. If it were not the case, however, that improvements to one generation would be passed on to the next, as the neo-Darwinians held, then efforts to educate poor, indigent immigrants would, at best, be only a very partial and very temporary solution.
1993. Models of biological change: Implications of three recent cases of ‘Lamarckian’ change. Perspectives in Ethology 10: 229–248. Berman, Milton. 1961. John Fiske: The evolution of a popularizer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Blainville, Henri-Marie Ducrotay de. 1822. De l’organisation des animaux, ou principes d’anatomie compar´ee, vol. 1. G. Levrault. Bowler, Peter J. 1983. The eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian theories in the decades around 1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
If it were not the case, however, that improvements to one generation would be passed on to the next, as the neo-Darwinians held, then efforts to educate poor, indigent immigrants would, at best, be only a very partial and very temporary solution. Even if some could be taught—through strenuous remedial training—to fend for themselves in the hurly-burly of modern urban life, the next generation would simply fall back to where the parents began, and the whole expensive, laborintensive process would have to begin again, on into the future indefinitely.
Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind by Richard Fortey
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