Product Description

Evolution is not merely the process that ruled the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, it also happens so quickly and frequently that it changes how all of us live our lives. Drugs fail because diseases like HIV and tuberculosis evolve in a matter of months, sidestepping pharmacology. Insects adapt and render harmless the most powerful of pesticides in a matter of years, not centuries. While the ecological impact of human technology has been well publicized, the evolutionary consequences of antibiotic and antiviral use, insecticide applications, and herbicide bioengineering have been largely unexplored. In this work Stephen R. Palumbi examines practical and critical aspects of modern evolution with a simple, yet forceful style that contains a sense of urgency and a sense of humour.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #814750 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-26
• Released on: 2002-08-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .73" h x 5.48" w x 8.28" l, .59 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
The first thing that Harvard University biology professor Stephen Palumbi wants you to know is that evolution is a fact, not a theory. The second is this: evolution does not require eons and eons to make its effects manifest. By tinkering with genes and rewriting the laws of natural selection, we humans have lately been "accelerating the evolutionary game, especially among the species that live with us most intimately"--not our pets, that is to say, but the food we eat, the pests that share that food, and the diseases that visit us.

Almost all of this accelerated evolution--which, as in the pointed case of the human immunodeficiency virus, occurs faster than we can track it--is an unintended, accidental consequence of some well-intentioned effort to improve human life by sidestepping nature. One such consequence is the growing incidence of drug-resistant bacteria and viruses, which have mutated to survive antibiotic treatments to the point that postoperative infections from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus now pose a major threat to hospitals. Another is the arrival of pests that have evolved to survive pesticides of many kinds, pests that threaten crops around the world in a time of ever-increasing scarcity. All this, Palumbi writes, is "evolution with teeth," and such responses to our hapless prompting make humans the most potent evolutionary form the planet has ever known. Whether we can survive our own power to reshape the earth remains a question. But, Palumbi concludes, ideas evolve, too, so that we can hope against hope to think our way back to more or less normal cycles of evolutionary change. Well-written and provocative, his book makes for a useful start. --Gregory McNamee

From Booklist
While some human beings stubbornly refuse to accept the fact that evolution is synonymous with life on Earth, others, such as Harvard biologist Palumbi, try valiantly to explain evolution's astonishing intricacies in order to reveal how our species is "upping the evolutionary ante and accelerating the evolutionary game." The example that hits closest to home is Palumbi's account of how various disease-causing bacteria have rapidly evolved strains resistant to antibiotics, the miracle drugs that briefly seemed to have eradicated such scourges as TB, but are now ineffectual against a host of frightening infections. The war against insects is another arena in which evolutionary wiliness has trumped humankind's efforts at controlling nature: insect species resistant to insecticides now abound. Palumbi's writing is lively and lucid, and his analogies are felicitous. His enlightening discussions of the evolution of HIV, the ecological dangers posed by precipitous bioengineering, and such remarkable evolutionary phenomena as the changes in size and spawning strategies of fish in overfished regions give weight and urgency to his call for evolution literacy. Donna Seaman
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Review
"Palumbi's is a sober and authoritative voice reporting on a topic of ecological and economic importance." The Times Higher Education Supplement - "Palumbi... does an excellent job of showing how man-made evolution is not only real but relevant." The New York Times