Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Fourth Edition brings clarity and coherence to an often unwieldy discipline, while incorporating the field's most important recent developments and applications.

    Chance and Necessity is a philosophical statement whose intention is to sweep away as both false and dangerous the animist conception of man that has dominated virtually all Western worldviews from primitive cultures to those of dialectical materialists. He bases his argument on the evidence of modern biology, which indisputably shows, that man is the product of chance genetic mutation. With the unrelenting logic of the scientist, he draws upon what we now know (and can theorize) of genetic structure to suggest an new way of looking at ourselves. He argues that objective scientific knowledge, the only reliable knowledge, denies the concepts of destiny or evolutionary purpose that underlie traditional philosophies. He contends that the persistence of those concepts is responsible for the intensifying schizophrenia of a world that accepts, and lives by, the fruits of science while refusing to face its moral implications. Dismissing as "animist" not only Plato, Hegel, Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin but Spencer and Marx as well, he calls for a new ethic that will recognize the distinction between objective knowledge and the realm of values--an ethic of knowledge that can, perhaps, save us from our deepening spiritual malaise, from the new age of darkness he sees coming.PrefaceOf strange objects Vitalisms and animisms Maxwell's demons Microscopic cyberneticsMolecular ontogenesis Invariance and perturbationsEvolution The frontiers The kingdom and the darknessAppendixes

    The author recounts his experiences observing sharks in the open seas, describes their characteristics, and discusses the safety precautions that should be taken around sharks.

    and Canada east of the Rockies.

    The book is structured the same as the previous edition, but every chapter has been updated to take into account recent developments, with numerous new references and figures. New and expanded features include: extensive modifications to the chapter on Movement, Muscle and Biomechanics; new material on respiratory pigments; feeding and digestion in shrimp and hoatzin; plant defense compounds; diving in seals; high temperature tolerance; the patch clamp method for ion channel research; the pineal gland and melatonin. Two-color throughout for clear description and illustration of fundamental principles.

    

    It presents the field of population genetics, starting with elementary concepts and leading the reader well into the field. It is concerned mainly with population genetics in a strict sense and deals primarily with natural populations and less fully with the rather similar problems that arise in breading livestock and cultivated plans. The emphasis is on the behavior of genes and population attributes under natural selection where the most important measure is Darwinian fitness. This text is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in genetics and population biology This book steers a middle course between completely verbal biological arguments and the rigor of the mathematician. The first two-thirds of the book do not require advanced mathematical background. An ordinary knowledge of calculus will suffice. The latter parts of the book, which deal with population stochastically, use more advanced methods. Chapter Titles: 1.Models of population growth. 2.Randomly mating populations. 3.Inbreeding. 4.Correlation between relatives and assertive mating. 5.Selection. 6.Populations in approximate equilibrium. 7.Properties of a finite population. 8.Stochastic processes in the change of gene frequencies. 9.Distribution of gene frequencies in populations. Appendix. Some statistical and mathematical methods frequently used in population genetics. Bibliography. Glossary. Index.

    Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches--focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules--each have their own power but also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for the history of science as a whole, The Logic of Life has greatly influenced the way scientists and historians view the past, present, and future of biology.

    Contents: Preface, A Short History of Ethology, The Ethogram: A Behavioral Inventory, The Fixed Action Pattern (Inborn Skills), Motivating Factors, Behavior as a Response to a Stimulus, Releasers (Expressive Movements and Other Social Signals), Natural Models and Mimicry, Reaction Chains, The Heirarchical Organization of Behavior, Phylogenetic Development of Behavior Patterns, The Ontogeny of Behavior Patterns, Mechanisms of Learning, Ecology and Behavior, Orientation in Space, Temporal Factors in Behavior, The Ethology of Man, Bibliography, Author Index, Subject Index.

    It extends these concepts to the segregation of genes that cause genetic variation in quantitative traits. Key techniques and methods are also covered.