Reviews for Mutation detection

The average rating for Mutation detection based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-09 00:00:00 Wheaton Illinois Subtitle: The Rise of the Animal Kingdom Wallace Arthur's kicking off point is a hypothetical space expedition from Mars to Earth. No Martians on board, just a space probe (similar to what we have sent to Mars), that safely lands on a beach somewhere on Earth. As the breathless Martian scientists wait for the first image beamed back from Earth, they see a...sandcastle. Let's say it's after all the tourists have gone home for the night, and the image the Martians get back is devoid of any direct pictures of any living thing. We can still expect, that the Martian NASA would go crazy with excitement, the sandcastle being a direct form of evidence for human life. Why is that? It's just a sand structure, no more complex than many naturally occurring ones, and the Martians may not have any real castles to compare it to, in order to see that it must have been made by life. This leads one into the question of what animals are, what they do, and what makes that special. That leads one into quite a lot of big topics. One that Arthur mostly avoids, is the topic of God. He mentions in the preface that he's going to take evolution as a demonstrated feature of reality, and otherwise doesn't spend much time discussing whether or not it exists. Some may think this is a defect, but I consider it a virtue; it gives us time to investigate a lot more interesting topics. For example, the contrasting (contesting?) ideas that all life is equally important and interesting, and the idea that some forms of life are more complex, and as a consequence more worthy of investigation. This is one which even the best scientists have a hard time addressing dispassionately. Another topic (or series of topics) which he analyzes is, given that things evolve, what are the mechanisms? Why are more limbs a boon to genetic innovation? Why are some genes more likely to mutate than others? Why are some mutations more likely than others? Any writer on the topic of evolution (and many others who write on topics which it impinges on) ends up in either the Gould camp or the Dawkins camp, whether they will or no. Arthur gives due credit to Dawkins, but he's clearly in the Gould camp. One Gould metaphor he discusses is the idea of "replaying the tape of life". In other words, if we did it all again, would it (Nietzsche-style) recur just the same? Or would it turn out looking fundamentally different? In other words, how much does chance impact the way life looks? If we think about the asteroid impact that appears to have triggered the mass extinction which killed off the dinosaurs, it seems that it could look quite different. If we look at the many examples of convergent evolution (the eyeball, the wing, and other adaptations have arisen several times, and they always look rather similar), it seems like it was destined to look something like it does now. It's not a topic on which a contemporary thinker should be expected to deliver a definitive answer, but Arthur does a good job of guiding us through the issues. Thus far, evolution by natural selection has been primarily a theory, not a tool. There appear to be some potential for using it as a method of design or a tool in epidemiology, if we can get better at discussing not whether or not it happens, but how it happens. For example; viruses, infectious bacteria, and pest insects all have demonstrated the ability to rapidly evolve to have immunity to our countermeasures. If we understood well enough how evolution happens, we should be able to nudge it in the directions we want (lower virulence, for example). The generation of thinkers who can do that is probably not here yet, but for them to arrive, we will need more writers and scientists like Arthur, telling us how the patterns of evolution recur across different timescales and species. Here is a field of thought waiting for those subtle enough to ponder its intricacies and implications, with a reassuring and readable guidebook. Recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-26 00:00:00 Joyce Petrillo I wanted to like this book but it just read like a survey of work done by other people with very little new stuff added by the author. I feel bad for writing that because I'm pretty sure this guy has forgotten more than I've ever learned about evolution. I just wasn't held by it and, while I enjoyed all the original ideas and theses brought up, this did not happen very often.