Evolution That Anyone Can Understand

✍ Scribed by Bernard Marcus (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 129
• Series: SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The function of scientific research is promoting the understanding of the world around us. In theory, anyway, the more we learn, the more potential we have of making our lives better. Thus, we have seen research in electronics provide us with computers, research in chemistry provide us with all manner of synthetics, and research in agriculture provide us with more food. Periodically, scientific research uncovers something that makes some of us uncomfortable. The discovery of the link between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease was not received well by the tobacco industry, and the link between global climate change and fossil fuel use has not been well received by the petroleum industry, to cite just two examples. Usually the response of those whose world has been disrupted by science is denial, often followed by attack on or ridicule of the science that has challenged them. In the long term, however, science usually turns out to be correct.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xii
Exactly What Is Evolution?....Pages 1-9
What’s God Got to Do With It?....Pages 11-19
But It is Only a Theory....Pages 21-26
Icefish and Other Genetic Anomalies and an Argument for Vestigiality....Pages 27-32
Islands in the Sky and Elsewhere....Pages 33-40
Superbugs....Pages 41-47
Biogeography....Pages 49-58
Up a Blind Alley....Pages 59-67
What is a Species?....Pages 69-74
How does it Work?....Pages 75-83
What is the Evidence?....Pages 85-92
Convergence....Pages 93-98
Is It Happening Now?....Pages 99-103
What About Us?....Pages 105-113
Back Matter....Pages 115-116

✦ Subjects

Evolutionary Biology; Popular Science, general; Biodiversity; Animal Genetics and Genomics