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Loading... At the Water's Edge : Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life…by Carl Zimmer
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 1   yapete | May 31, 2008 |  Intelligent, precise, and explains the Sonic the Hedgehog gene. Also very good on intermediate forms. (  )1 amandrake | May 9, 2008 | If Zimmer would write books with shorter titles and larger print, he might well become my new favorite author. I don't know how many times I stopped reading and shouted out to my wife, "Hey, did you know this?," but it was a lot. (Of course, she did already know it, since she is a biology teacher, but it made me feel better about myself that now I knew it, too.) This is a fascinating book about how life dragged itself out of the oceans, got started in God knows how many different directions, and eventually how mammals found their way back to the sea as whales and dolphins. It is a complicated story of fossils and genetic evidence, still not completely pieced together, but Zimmer tells it with a storyteller's gift. If you spurned biology for physics classes like I did, here is a book you really don't want to miss reading. (  ) co_coyote | Mar 23, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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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.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:04 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English (3)
Just a few years ago one of the Intelligent Design people (Behe) claimed that they will never find an intermediary between land animals and wales. Read this book and see what a bunch of losers the ID creationists really are. They can only thrive on denying the progress of science. (