Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The
New Science of Evo Devo by Sean
Carroll
Best Evolution Book For Where Science Could Go
Every animal form is the product of two processes--development from an
egg and evolution from its ancestors, writes Sean B. Carroll in his
introduction to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. The new science of evo
devo--or evolutionary developmental biology--examines the relationships
between those two processes, embryonic development and evolutionary
changes, despite their radically different time scales. Carroll first offers a
recap of how genes express themselves in a growing embryo, then peers
into the life histories of real-life examples to explain how those genes have
changed (or not changed) over millions of years of evolution. Paraphrasing
Thomas Huxley, he asks us to consider evolution and development as two
sides of the same coin. We may marvel at the process of an egg
becoming an adult, but we accept it as an everyday fact. It is merely then a
lack of imagination to fail to grasp how changes in this process that

assimilated over long periods of time, far longer than the span of human
experience, shape lifes diversity. The books second half is where Carroll
really gets at the meat of evo devo, explaining how regulatory genes
control such mysteries as individual and population changes in butterflys
spots, jaguar fur, and hominid skulls. Evo devo is one of the hottest areas
of study in 21st-century biology, and Carrolls outline of the field is a great
place to start understanding it. --Therese Littleton
Personal Review: Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New
Science of Evo Devo by Sean Carroll
For a large part of the 20th century, zoologists thought every type of
animal had a unique set of genes, the genes that made rabbits give birth to
baby rabbits, or that made grasshopper eggs hatch grasshopper nymphs.
Instead, Sean B. Carroll tells us, in his charmingly offhand style, animals
turn out to share great numbers of genes. In particular, we share master
genes, the ones responsible for controlling embryological development.
These master genes have been highly conserved for hundreds of millions
of years, have passed into both great branches of animals, and have been
central to the evolution of what Darwin called, "endless forms most
beautiful."
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