The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262015242 ISBN 13: 9780262015240

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2011

Synopsis

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry published their influential book The Major Transitions in Evolution. The "transitions" that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry chose to describe all constituted major changes in the kinds of organisms that existed but, most important, these events also transformed the evolutionary process itself. The evolution of new levels of biological organization, such as chromosomes, cells, multicelled organisms, and complex social groups radically changed the kinds of individuals natural selection could act upon. Many of these events also produced revolutionary changes in the process of inheritance, by expanding the range and fidelity of transmission, establishing new inheritance channels, and developing more open-ended sources of variation. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry had planned a major revision of their work, but the death of Maynard Smith in 2004 prevented this. In this volume, prominent scholars (including Szathmáry himself) reconsider and extend the earlier book's themes in light of recent developments in evolutionary biology. The contributors discuss different frameworks for understanding macroevolution, prokaryote evolution (the study of which has been aided by developments in molecular biology), and the complex evolution of multicellularity.

About this title

About the Author

Brett Calcott is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ASU/SFI Center for Complex Biosocial Systems in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and coeditor (with Kim Sterelny) of The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (MIT Press, 2011).

Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. His books include Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt; second edition, MIT Press).

Brett Calcott is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ASU/SFI Center for Complex Biosocial Systems in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and coeditor (with Kim Sterelny) of The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (MIT Press, 2011).

Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. His books include Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt; second edition, MIT Press).

Review

Calcott and Sterelny deserve our thanks for bringing together a renowned group of philosophers and evolutionary biologists to revisit a recent classic with a fair yet critical tone that also treats readers to a glimpse of the cutting edge. This collection is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the promise of theoretical unification in evolutionary biology.

―The Quarterly Review of Biology

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0262015242
• ISBN 13: 9780262015240
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Calcott Brett, Sterelny Kim