Modularity: Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems

✍ Scribed by Werner Callebaut, Diego Rasskin-Gutman

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 473
• Series: Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology
• Edition: illustrated edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This is a very interesting book. Or at least, it's a book about a cluster of very interesting topics, and occasionally contains interesting insights about these topics.

The problem is that the book is a bit too modular - the chapters don't work very well together. Every author seems to have his own concept of modularity. As several of the chapters are primarily concerned with defining modularity, this could be taken to be a good thing, but it isn't. The simple reason is that many of the concepts of modularity are simply not interesting to many readers. For me, Calabretta's chapter was very interesting, as well as Simon's introduction and some other chapters, but the chapters on modularity in art and in animal skeletons were just plain uninteresting. (Which is not to say that they are bad chapters in themselves, they are probably higly relevant to some people.)

Given that the book is likely to contain just a few chapters that interest you, I think the price is a bit too high for it to be worth buying.

✦ Table of Contents

Series Foreword......Page 8
Foreword......Page 10
Preface......Page 16
I INTRODUCTION......Page 18
1 The Ubiquity of Modularity......Page 20
II EVO-DEVO: THE MAKING OF A MODULAR WORLD......Page 46
2 Natural Selection and the Origin of Modules......Page 50
3 Evolutionary Modules: Conceptual Analyses and Empirical Hypotheses......Page 68
4 Evolutionary Developmental Biology Meets Levels of Selection: Modular Integration or Competition, or Both?......Page 78
5 Modularity in Evolution: Some Low-Level Questions......Page 116
6 Evolutionary Lock-In and the Origin of Modularity in RNA Structure......Page 146
7 Amphibian Variations: The Role of Modules in Mosaic Evolution......Page 160
III EVO-PATTERNS:WORKING TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF FORMS......Page 198
8 The Remodularization of the Organism......Page 202
9 Modularity: Jumping Forms within Morphospace......Page 224
10 Morphological Modularity and Macroevolution: Conceptual and Empirical Aspects......Page 238
11 Hierarchical Integration of Modular Structures in the Evolution of Animal Skeletons......Page 256
12 Modularity in Art......Page 276
13 Modularity at the Boundary Between Art and Science......Page 300
IV MODULARITY OF MIND AND CULTURE......Page 322
14 Evolutionary Connectionism and Mind/Brain Modularity......Page 326
15 Modularity and Chunking......Page 348
16 Modularity of Cognitive Organization: Why It Is So Appealing and Why It Is Wrong......Page 370
17 Decomposability and Modularity of Economic Interactions......Page 400
18 The Natural Logic of Communicative Possibilities: Modularity and Presupposition......Page 426
Contributors......Page 452
Index......Page 454