Shaping Life: Genes, Embryos and Evolution Book

This slim volume is part of "Darwinism Today", a series of provocative short books by an international group of leading thinkers in the field of evolutionary theory and its impact on our society. The book series developed out of a programme of Darwin Seminars at the London School of Economics. Each essay stands alone as a topic and is about 14,000 words long. Topics include farming, labour, and genetics. The series is edited by Helena Cronin and Oliver Curry and aims to reach a wide readership. The remarkable process by which a simple undifferentiated egg turns into a complex adult organism has been, as John Maynard Smith says "until recently, mysterious". Just how it happens was identified 12 years ago by Maynard Smith as one of the outstanding problems in biology (along with how the brain works). Since 1986, there has been a revolution in our understanding of developmental biology, with the application of ideas and techniques of genetics. Maynard Smith is a well known author of important books on biology, an eminent evolutionary biologist and Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex. In this essay he gives an account of this revolution and argues that developmental biologists should "pay attention to dynamical processes as well as to genetic control". For, complex patterns can emerge in dynamical systems "without the need for specific instructions regulating the development of particular parts". He traces the roots of the notion of "self-organisation" back to Goethe's "Naturphilosophie". To achieve these aims he has to introduce the reader to some complex concepts such as the so-called Hox genes and their role in "switching" and activating the development of particular structures during early embryological development. Fortunately Maynard Smith is an expert communicator of scientific ideas so that his text is readily accessible. Likewise, he has to broach the concept of self-organisation. How are proteins patterned to produce biological structures? For, as Maynard Smith points out, "it is not enough to say that different genes are switched on in different places". To find the answer he predicts that dialogue will be needed between those who espouse "a global, holistic and dynamic" approach to developmental biology and those who take the more local reductionist approach, "dependent on the notions of information, regulation and control". --Douglas PalmerRead More