Sean B. Carroll

Gobsmacking! From convergent evolution to fossil genes we are here taken through a breathtaking journey into the realm of evolution, with DNA's point of view as sole guide and captain.

Sean B. Carroll's genocentrism is captivating, fascinating, enlightening. His writing style is engaging and very accessible. The whole is a great work absolutely impossible to put down until the last line of the last page!

Brillantly, he also argues for a better recognition of evolutionary science those impact, show more from environmental issues to medicine cannot be underestimated. About, he's not afraid to blow away anti-evolutionary fantasies -from Lyssenko's case in the USSR to the more contemporary and burning debate around the so-called 'Intelligent Design'.

Fantastic! show less

"Evo devo" might sound like an 80's rock band, but this book is one of those few that really does open the door to a new world of wonder -- evolutionary developmental biology, or the new and rapidly growing understanding of how a single cell is able to unfold itself, step by step, into enormously complex trillion-celled systems like us. And it's a story told here first hand, by a leading investigator of this new world, with warmth, passion, and humor.

This beautifully constructed and written tale of two intellects came as a complete surprise to me. Though I thought I had known both of these thinkers well, I had no idea of the splendid connection they had made before during and after the Occupation of France. Perhaps like Oppenheimer in this country, Jacques Monod informed his scientific thinking and his life choices with a deep understanding of history and the political realities surging around him. While Camus is well-known as both a show more writer of fiction and engaged literary and political commentary, this book shed much light on how his thinking and his actions evolved and became realized. Like the recently published Algerian journals, this text is a must for those of us who love him. All in all a gem not to be missed. Bravo. Vive la France show less

Brave Genius is a reminder that the world turns on little, tiny gears and sometimes the most unlikely people end up thrown together. This is the biography of two post-war Nobel Prize winners, Albert Camus for literature and Jacques Monod for medicine. But before they received those honors they were idealists fighting together with the French Resistance. This detail laden work about the odd couple of an absurdist philosopher and a biologist will flesh out the lives of these brilliant men and show more the difficult war years they traversed as friends and comrades. show less