Carroll: Endless Forms Most Beautiful
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Along the way we get a lot of insight about what, until recently, was thought of as "junk DNA", great swaths of the molecule that didn't seem to ''do'' anything. Well, it turns out that quite a bit of it does ''do'' something during development: those are the switches that turn the genes on and off in different places and at different times during development, and these switches are themselves subject to mutation, multiplication, and evolution. | Along the way we get a lot of insight about what, until recently, was thought of as "junk DNA", great swaths of the molecule that didn't seem to ''do'' anything. Well, it turns out that quite a bit of it does ''do'' something during development: those are the switches that turn the genes on and off in different places and at different times during development, and these switches are themselves subject to mutation, multiplication, and evolution. | ||
| - | I can praise this book for its clarity, | + | I can praise this book for its clarity, its enthusiasm, its skill at exposition—those are all true. It's also fun and exciting to read, and a real page turner if you've wondered at all about how genes make animals and how evolution makes different genes. |
Carroll's book is itself an example of the application of careful analytical thinking and empirical tests to some tough problems, so we can read it as a brilliant case-study of science in action. Plus, he shares some thoughts on the educational process: | Carroll's book is itself an example of the application of careful analytical thinking and empirical tests to some tough problems, so we can read it as a brilliant case-study of science in action. Plus, he shares some thoughts on the educational process: | ||
