Michael S. Y. Lee Nature One of the most fascinating topics in biology....[Zimmer] clearly understands the diverse scientific issues involved, and cuts through the scientific jargon so anyone can comprehend them.
Description
Everybody Out of the Pond
At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us.
We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago.
In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.
Reviews
Philip Gingerich The New York Times Book Review Zimmer does a good job of explaining how profoundly different are the physiological and structural requirements of life in water compared to life on land.
Booklist A fascinating story, which Zimmer unfolds as a tale of high-stakes scientific sleuthing...thanks to marvelously lucid writing.
Publishers Weekly More than just an informative book about macroevolution itself, this is an entertaining history of ideas written with literary flair and technical rigor.