Product Description: Bacteria in various habitats are subject to continuously changing environmental conditions, such as nutrient deprivation, heat and cold stress, UV radiation, oxidative stress, dessication, acid stress, nitrosative stress, cell envelope stress, heavy metal exposure, osmotic stress, and others...read more

Product Description: By focusing on the crucial role of environment in the process of adaptation, Robert Brandon clarifies definitions and principles so as to help make the argument of evolution by natural selection empirically testable. He proposes that natural selection is the process of differential reproduction resulting from differential adaptedness to a common selective environment...read more

Product Description: All organisms live in clusters, but such fractured local populations, or demes, nonetheless maintain connectivity with one another by some amount of gene flow between them. Most such metapopulations occur naturally, like clusters of amphibians in vernal ponds or baboon troops spread across the African veldt...read more

Product Description: Deep inside caves, at the bottoms of oceans and lakes, beneath the ground: these concealed habitats are absent of sunlight. This strange and fascinating world of complete darkness is not a solitary place―it is inhabited by millions of life forms...read more

Product Description: This book explores the current state of knowledge about microbial evolution under extreme conditions addressing questions from the perspectives of different extreme environments, organisms, and evolutionary processes: What is known about the processes of evolution that produce adaptations to extreme conditions? Can this knowledge be applied to other systems? What requires future research...read more

Product Description: This provocative exploration of the internal logic of lesbian relationships argues that they are not patterned after heterosexual ones but rely on the interplay of psychosexual differences between women.

In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman—chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a leader in the field—gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years, even as it shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning this paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease.  The Story of the Human Body brilliantly illuminates as never before the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit-based diet; the advent of hunting and gathering, leading to our superlative endurance athleticism; the development of a very large brain; and the incipience of cultural proficiencies. Lieberman also elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how our bodies were further transformed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.  While these ongoing changes have brought about many benefits, they have also created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, Lieberman argues, resulting in the growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Lieberman proposes that many of these chronic illnesses persist and in some cases are intensifying because of “dysevolution,” a pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated. And finally—provocatively—he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes even compel us to create a more salubrious environment. (With charts and line drawings throughout.)

Product Description: Our world is incredibly diverse, and plants and animals must adapt in order to survive. This book will teach readers how adaptation works, why living things must adapt, and how a changing world makes adaptation more necessary than ever.

At a glance, most species seem adapted to the environment in which they live. Yet species relentlessly evolve, and populations within species evolve in different ways. Evolution, as it turns out, is much more dynamic than biologists realized just a few decades ago. In Relentless Evolution, John N. Thompson explores why adaptive evolution never ceases and why natural selection acts on species in so many different ways. Thompson presents a view of life in which ongoing evolution is essential and inevitable. Each chapter focuses on one of the major problems in adaptive evolution: How fast is evolution? How strong is natural selection? How do species co-opt the genomes of other species as they adapt? Why does adaptive evolution sometimes lead to more, rather than less, genetic variation within populations? How does the process of adaptation drive the evolution of new species? How does coevolution among species continually reshape the web of life? And, more generally, how are our views of adaptive evolution changing? Relentless Evolution draws on studies of all the major forms of life—from microbes that evolve in microcosms within a few weeks to plants and animals that sometimes evolve in detectable ways within a few decades. It shows evolution not as a slow and stately process, but rather as a continual and sometimes frenetic process that favors yet more evolutionary change.

Product Description: This book focuses on sensing and the evolution of animals. Using the five senses (visual, auditory, and olfactory perception, and taste and touch), animals can receive environmental stimuli and respond to them. Changes in these sensitivities might cause changes in aspects of animals’ lives such as habitat, activity timing, and diet―and vice versa...read more

Product Description: Books in the Extreme Nature series reveal examples of some of the most bizarre, amazing, and extreme events in the natural world. This book looks at harsh habitats and considers some of the animals and plants that manage to survive in the hottest, coldest, highest, and driest places on Earth...read more

Product Description: There is increasing evidence that the structure and functioning of ecological communities and ecosystems are strongly influenced by flexible traits of individuals within species. A deep understanding of how trait flexibility alters direct and indirect species interactions is crucial for addressing key issues in basic and applied ecology...read more

Product Description: In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote "I think" and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin's tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation – adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things...read more

Product Description: Why do tigers have stripes? Do they choose to have them, or is that just how they are? Adaptation and Survival explains what is meant by the fitness of an organism and shows how adaptations improve a plant or animal's chances of survival to have offspring...read more

Product Description: Temperature adaptation is a much neglected field in the minds of climate change researchers and policy makers. However, increasing fluctuations in temperature means that the risk of cold and heat stress will pose an increasing threat to both wild and cultivated plants and animals, with frost injury expected to cause devastating damage to crops on an increasingly large scale...read more