The New Foundations of Evolution: On the Tree of Life

by Jan Sapp

Overview

This is the story of a profound revolution in the way biologists explore life's history, understand its evolutionary processes, and reveal its diversity. It is about life's smallest entities, deepest diversity, and greatest cellular biomass: the microbiosphere. Jan Sapp introduces us to a new field of evolutionary biology and a new brand of molecular evolutionists who descend to the foundations of evolution on Earth to explore the origins of the genetic system and the primary life forms from which all others have emerged. In so doing, he examines-from Lamarck to the present-the means of pursuing the evolution of complexity, and of depicting the greatest differences among organisms.

The New Foundations of Evolution takes us into a world that classical evolutionists could never have imagined: a deep phylogeny based on three domains of life and multiple kingdoms, and created by mechanisms very unlike those considered by Darwin and his followers. Evolution by leaps seems to occur regularly in the microbial world where molecular evolutionists have shown the inheritance of acquired genes and genomes are major modes of evolutionary innovation.

Revisiting the history of microbiology for the first time from the perspective of evolutionary biology, Sapp shows why classical Darwinian conceptions centering on questions of the origin of species were forged without a microbial foundation, why classical microbiologists considered it impossible to know the course of evolution, and classical molecular biologists considered the evolution of the molecular genetic system to be beyond understanding. In telling this stirring story of scientific iconoclasm, this book elucidates how the new evolutionary biology arose, what methods and assumptions underpin it, and the fiery controversies that continue to shape biologists' understanding of the foundations of evolution today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195388497
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/24/2009
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jan Sapp is a Professor in the Department of Biology at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Table of Contents

ForewordPreface1. Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? 2. Microbes First3. The Germ of Phylogeny4. Creatures Void of Form5. About Chaos6. Kingdoms at Biology's Borders7. The Prokaryote and the Eukaryote8. On the Unity of Life9. Symbiotic Complexity10. The Morning of Molecular Phylogenetics11. Roots in the Genetic Code12. A Third Form of Life13. A Kingdom on a Molecule14. Against Adaptationism15. In the Capital of the New Kingdom16. Out of Eden17. Sketching the Tree of Life18. The Dawn Cell Controversy19. Three Domains20. Disputed Territories21. Grappling the World Wide Web22. Entangled Roots and Braided LivesConcluding Remarks

Editorial Reviews

"Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay The New Foundations of Evolution is that having read it, I feel that I better understand the minds of my own fellow microbiologists. That Sapp makes his story so sparkling is an achivement all the more impressive when one remembers he must include a fair amount of taconomy, both antiquated and modern."—W.P. Hanage Science

"Penetrating and paradigm-shifting. Sapp expertly... brings alive the dynamism at the heart of one of the most significant revolutions in the history of biology."—American Scientist

"This book recounts in a very thoughtful and accessible way the historical making of a tripartite relationship, that of microbiology, biological classification, and evolution, and how this triangle is still evolving to generate a more holistic vision of evolutionary biology."—The Quarterly Review of Biology

From the Publisher