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Our understanding of reproduction and reproductive processes is often biased towards the behaviour of organisms most familiar to us. As such, the amazing disparity of the phenomena of reproduction and sex is often overlooked. Understanding Reproduction addresses all the main facets of this large chapter of the life sciences, including discussions of asexual reproduction, parthenogenesis, sex determination, reproductive effort, and much more. The book features an abundance of examples from across the tree of life, including animals, plants, fungi, protists and bacteria. Written in an accessible and easy-to-digest style, overcoming the intimidating diversity of the technical terminology, this book will appeal to interested general readers, biologists, science educators, philosophers and medical doctors.
1. Individuals and Reproduction
2. Reproduction in the Life Cycle
3. Reproduction Without Sex
4. Reproduction with Sex
5. Two-Parent Sexual Reproduction
6. One-Parent (or Nearly so) Sexual Reproduction
7. Development of Sexual Traits
8. Widening the View: Reproductive Strategies
Concluding Remarks: Difficult Boundaries
Giuseppe Fusco is Associate Professor of Zoology at the Department of Biology of the University of Padova. His research is in the area of evolutionary biology, with a focus on the variation produced in each generation through reproduction and development, the 'raw material' on which natural selection and other mechanisms of evolutionary change operate. He is the editor of the volumes Evolving Pathways: Key Themes in Evolutionary Developmental Biology (2008), From Polyphenism to Complex Metazoan Life Cycles (2010), Arthropod Biology and Evolution: Molecules, Development, Morphology (2013), Perspectives on Evolutionary and Developmental Biology (2019) and author, with Alessandro Minelli, of The Biology of Reproduction (2019).
Alessandro Minelli was a Professor of Zoology at the University of Padova until his retirement in 2011. He previously served as the Speciality Chief Editor for evolutionary developmental biology for the journal, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He was previously Vice-President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. Having studied animals for the majority of his career, on retirement he decided to study plant evolutionary development. He is the author of Biological Systematics (1993), The Development of Animal Form (2003), Forms of Becoming (2009), Perspectives in Animal Phylogeny and Evolution (2009), Plant Evolutionary Developmental Biology (2018), The Biology of Reproduction (2019, with Giuseppe Fusco), and Understanding Development (2021).
"Fusco and Minelli provide a very clear and accessible overview of the strange and wonderful diversity of reproductive strategies and mechanisms in animals, plants and other organisms. They explain key concepts, define important terms, and place reproductive modes within an ecological and evolutionary context. This book will be a useful reference for biologists, students and even curious non-specialists."
– Russell Bonduriansky, University of New South Wales, Australia
"As a plant biologist, I often find myself trying to explain reproduction in plants as though they are somehow an anomaly rather than just another way of reaching the same goal following first principles. This perception of anomaly comes from a pedagogical bias of teaching reproduction as 'sex in mammals'. This book ties together concepts regardless of organism, drawing clear lines between a complex diversity of patterns and their underlying reproductive processes."
– Chelsea D. Specht, Barbara McClintock Professor in Plant Biology, Cornell University, USA
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