The Evolution of Life

About this book

The Evolution of Life stands alone amongst the major textbooks by focusing on key principles to offer a truly accessible, unintimidating treatment of evolutionary biology.

With adaptation through natural selection – how the integrated complexity of living organisms comes about – as its central theme, The Evolution of Life adopts a lucid, crystal-clear narrative to explain the mechanism of evolution and its main outcomes.

Chapters are grouped into six themed parts – basics, history, origins, adaptation, selection, and interaction – and the text is regularly interspersed with descriptive headings that set out a clear path through the subject.

The Evolution of Life is written to instil a true understanding of the essential principles of evolutionary biology without that understanding being compromised by peripheral detail. As such, it is the ideal introduction for any student encountering this fascinating subject for the first time.

Contents

Section 1: Basics
1: The Evidence for Evolution
2: The Engine of Evolution

Section 2: History
3: The Tree of Life
4: The Diversity of Life
5: The Ancestry of Life

Section 3: Origins
6: The Origin of Variation
7: The Origin of Species
8: The Origin of Innovation

Section 4: Adaptation
9: Adaptation and Evolved Design
10: Evolving Bodies
11: The Dynamic Genome

Section 5: Selection
12: Artificial Selection
13: Experimental Evolution
14: Selection in Natural Populations

Section 6: Interaction
15: Sexual Selection
16: Cooperation and Conflict
17: Symbiosis and Struggle

Customer Reviews

Biography

Graham Bell is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology at McGill University, Montreal, where his research explores genetic variation and species diversity in environments that vary in space and time. Having published over 120 research papers in refereed journals, he is also the author of Selection: the Mechanism of Evolution (second edition, OUP, 2007).