Evolution: Making Sense of Life. With the technical rigor and conceptual depth that today’s biology majors require. Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist, brings compelling storytelling to the book, bringing evolutionary research to life.

I started out really wanting to like this book, and I ended up finishing it still wanting to like it, but things went astray somewhere in between. In essence, I think that everyone involved has tried just a bit too hard to produce this book, and they have over-done it in a way that makes the whole seem less than the sum of the parts.Evolution: Making Sense of Life is an interesting collaboration between a well-known science writer and an academic biologist.

Carl Zimmer is an award-winning writer on evolution, with several books for the masses under his belt, whereas Douglas Emlen is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Montana (in the United States). According to Emlen's professional homepage, the collaboration had one main goal:a revolutionary new textbook designed from the start to be an enjoyable and engaging read. Evolution reflects our shared vision for what modern textbooks can be: exciting, relevant, concept-oriented, and gorgeously illustrated; a reading adventure designed to grab the imagination of students, showing them exactly why it is that evolution makes such brilliant sense of life.This goal is an important concept for me, because my earliest book reviews (in the early 1990s) concerned themselves very much with the search for a textbook that presented systematics as an interesting science rather than solely as one component of academic intellectual activity. I failed to find any such thing at the time. So, Zimmer and Emlen have their hearts in the right place, as far as I am concerned. My concern is that they may have missed their goal simply by trying too hard.The writing in the book itself is smooth and engaging, which is perhaps the book's greatest strength.

A textbook can consist of “a page of dry text defining some obscure term in biology” (to quote a book review that I once read), but Zimmer and Emlen have succeeded in going well beyond this. Benq software drivers for mac. There is, sadly, no way to make a textbook read like a novel, but making it readable is itself a meaningful goal in science.The book is organized in an innovative way, starting with the science and philosophy of evolution, then proceeding through fossils, phylogenetics, genotypes, phenotypes, selection, adaptation, microevolution, macroevolution, and behavior, and ending with human evolution and medicine. I have seen few books that try to create an interesting storyline throughout, and yet this one does. The objective has not been to present evolutionary studies but rather to make studying evolution interesting. This is a laudable goal, and it has been amply achieved.The content is as current as you could expect, but obviously only until last year, and only from the authors' perspective. This does create a few problems, arising from the fact that the book leads you to expect an unreasonable degree of currency. For example, topics such as junk DNA, or phylogenetic networks versus trees, get mentioned, but not in a way that will allow the book to remain contemporaneous.

It is true that one way to engage the interest of students is by presenting last week's news rather than last year's, but I doubt that a textbook could ever do this. Currency should be the preserve of the students' interactions with their instructors, not their authors.Moreover, Zimmer and Emlen wished to create a “reading adventure” but, instead of being an introductory story, it is more like The Lord of the Rings, an epic saga in the Scandinavian tradition.

This is hardly surprising, because the more you look at something in biology the more complex it turns out to be. Evolution, as the over-arching conceptual framework for all of the biological sciences, is thus inevitably the most complex idea (or set of ideas) to fully grasp. However, I am not sure that this is what a textbook should be trying to do, as even I found the book rather over-whelming.

That is, while trying to present the message “evolution is all-encompassing,” the authors end up saying “evolution is over-whelming.” Trying to keep track of all of the information was like trying to keep track of all the Russian names in a Tolstoy novel.Perhaps it works better as a textbook, which is read a bit at a time over the several months of a semester, but even then this might not quite work. There are 18 chapters, ranging from 18–52 pages, although most are in the 32–40 page range. Since semesters often have 12–13 weeks of classes (plus tests, etc.), the question for an instructor becomes which chapters to leave out, or which to combine into a single session. A perusal of the web for courses that have already adopted the book (which came out in August 2012, even though the copyright date is 2013) indicates that the most popular ones to skip are the final four, on partnerships, behavior, humans, and medicine, and the first couple of chapters are most often combined.Emlen has also commented: “We want this book to be fun to read and, more importantly, we want the content to stick in the minds of students.” These are, indeed, 2 distinct goals, as the one does not necessarily imply the other. Perhaps the most obvious approach used by the authors to providing an “engaging read” is to present anecdotes, both about people (at the start of each chapter) and about organisms (during the chapters). However, using anecdotes about each topic is burdened with the possibility that the anecdotes will be the only remembered thing.

Indeed, there are comments in online review sites that suggest that this has in fact happened: “you'll never care (or, in my case, remember) what the Buri experiment is, but at least you'll remember what a Harlequin beetle or an okapi looks like” (from Joanna, at GoodReads).The authors' approach to providing something that is “gorgeously illustrated” has, I am sorry to say, turned out as far too many illustrations per page. The individual photos are very pleasing, and the graphs and other processed data are clear and informative, but there are simply too many per page for there to be any visual coherence. Sorting out what was what on each and every page became a real challenge after a while. I am not convinced that I will even remember what an okapi looks like, because by the end of the book I had overdosed. So, the content is to some extent buried under the presentation. Even the index is in 4 colors (plus italics). Once again, here I think that less might be more.The over-whelming nature of the book is also translated into its size, of course.

William Goldman, the novelist and scriptwriter, once wrote a large book ( Boys and Girls Together), about which he later claimed one reviewer wrote: “‘a child of nine could understand this book before he could lift it'. From there the review got really bad.” Zimmer and Emlen are lucky not to have that same reviewer, because their book has 713 pages and weighs 2 kg, even in paperback. If you try to read this book in bed, it is literally life-threatening.So, do yourself a favor, and get a copy of the app for your iPad Mini, instead, because this is precisely the type of book that Apple had in mind when they designed that device to help with your bedtime reading.

At the time of writing, the Evolution app is up to Version 1.3, so most of the bugs have been ironed out.Importantly, in this case, the app is not simply an adjunct to the printed version of the book but is a stand-alone multimedia “experience” containing images, audio and video clips, and interactive graphics and exercises. For example, when reading about the way male frogs attract females when mating, you can actually listen to the difference between apparently attractive and nonattractive calls. Also, you can highlight text information and make notes in the margins, and then create custom study sheets that incorporate supplemental information.Zimmer and Emlen are at the forefront of the move to enhanced digital presentation. As has noted: “publishers are increasingly placing equal or greater importance on the digital product rather than considering it as an add-on to the printed book.” This kills 2 birds with one stone—authors can focus on “the complete learning experience” rather than trying to do everything with written words, and the readers can stop feeling like they are doing weight training every time they try to learn something. A similar thing can be said about species-identification books, where a printed book is both heavier and less useful than an interactive app, especially in the field.So, the bottom line with Evolution is that this is a very well-intentioned book that achieves many laudable aims but simply goes too far in trying to achieve its overall goal—the sum of the parts ends up being more than the whole. I sincerely hope that this can be addressed in a second edition.

Evolutionary Biologist, Douglas Emlen and Science Writer, Carl Zimmer continue to improve their widely-praised evolution textbook. Emlen, an award-winning evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana, has infused Evolution: Making Sense of Life with the technical rigor and conceptual depth that today’s biology majors require. Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist, brings compelling storytelling to the book, bringing evolutionary research to life through a narrative sure to capture the attention of evolution students.With riveting stories about evolutionary biologists at work everywhere from the Arctic to tropical rainforests to hospital wards, the book is a reading adventure designed to grab the imagination of students, showing them exactly why it is that evolution makes such brilliant sense of life.The new edition of Evolution: Making Sense of Life is now supported in SaplingPlus.

Created and supported by the author and other educators, SaplingPlus’s instructional online homework drives student success and saves educators’ time. Automatically graded homework problem contains hints, answer-specific feedback, and solutions to ensure that students find the help they need. Helping students make sense of evolutionEvolutionary Biologist, Douglas Emlen and Science Writer, Carl Zimmer continue to improve their widely-praised evolution textbook. Emlen, an award-winning evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana, has infused Evolution: Making Sense of Life with the technical rigor and conceptual depth that today’s biology majors require. Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist, brings compelling storytelling to the book, bringing evolutionary research to life through a narrative sure to capture the attention of evolution students.With riveting stories about evolutionary biologists at work everywhere from the Arctic to tropical rainforests to hospital wards, the book is a reading adventure designed to grab the imagination of students, showing them exactly why it is that evolution makes such brilliant sense of life.The new edition of Evolution: Making Sense of Life is now supported in SaplingPlus. Created and supported by the author and other educators, SaplingPlus’s instructional online homework drives student success and saves educators’ time.

Automatically graded homework problem contains hints, answer-specific feedback, and solutions to ensure that students find the help they need. Compelling narrative: Throughout Evolution, the authors present stories about evolutionary biologists and how they’ve advanced our understanding of the history of life. We recount how these scientists set out to test hypotheses, how they developed experiments or went in search of fossils, and how they interpreted their results. This is a book designed to be read, rather than just a reference text.Strong pedagogy designed to help students master the most difficult concepts in evolutionary biologyFundamental concepts are presented step-by-step and revisited in later chapters to give students opportunities to deepen their understandingMathematical coverage is integrated throughout the text in select boxes, allowing instructors to cover as much or as little detail as needed for their course. Quantitative concepts are explained clearly through the narrative, without solely relying on equations as an explanation, which can be intimidating to some students.SaplingPlus introduces exciting new videos that augment the book coverage of topics many students find difficult. The new edition of Evolution: Making Sense of Life is now supported in SaplingPlus.

Created and supported by the author and other educators, SaplingPlus’s instructional online homework drives student success and saves educators’ time. Automatically graded homework problem contains hints, answer-specific feedback, and solutions to ensure that students find the help they need. Fully loaded with our interactive e-Book book and all student and instructor resources, SaplingPlus has a variety of assessments, videos, and animations aligned with each chapter of the text. LearningCurve adaptive quizzing helps students prepare for class and drives them back to the text to reinforce their learning.SaplingPlus introduces exciting new videos that augment the book coverage of topics many students find difficult. Carl ZimmerCarl Zimmer is one of the country’s leading science writers. A columnist for The New York Times and a regular contributor to magazines like Scientific American and National Geographic, he is the author of thirteen books, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea and A Planet of Viruses.

Zimmer is a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches science writing. He is a three-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award and the winner of the National Academies Communication Award. You can learn more at the author's website:. Emlen is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering from the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, multiple research awards from the National Science Foundation, including their five-year CAREER award, and a Young Investigator Prize and the E. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American Society of Naturalists. His research has been featured in outlets including the New York Times and National Public Radio’s Fresh Air.

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