Bioluminescence is everywhere on earth—most of all in the ocean, from angler fish in the depths to the flashing of dinoflagellates at the surface. Here, Thérèse Wilson and Woody Hastings explore the natural history, evolution, and biochemistry of the diverse array of organisms that emit light.

While some bacteria, mushrooms, and invertebrates, as well as fish, are bioluminescent, other vertebrates and plants are not. The sporadic distribution and paucity of luminous forms calls for explanation, as does the fact that unrelated groups evolved completely different biochemical pathways to luminescence. The authors explore the hypothesis that many different luciferase systems arose in the early evolution of life because of their ability to remove oxygen, which was toxic to life when it first appeared on earth. As oxygen became abundant and bioluminescence was no longer adequate for oxygen removal, other antioxidant mechanisms evolved and most luminous species became extinct. Those light-emitting species that avoided extinction evolved uses with survival value for the light itself. Today’s luminous organisms use bioluminescence for defense from predators, for their own predatory purposes, or for communication in sexual courtship.

Bioluminescence was earlier viewed as a fascinating feature of the living world, but one whose study seemed unlikely to contribute in any practical way. Today, bioluminescence is no longer an esoteric area of research. Applications are numerous, ranging from the rapid detection of microbial contamination in beef and water, to finding the location of cancer cells, to working out circuitry in the brain.

In social relationships—whether between mates, parents and offspring, or friends—we find much of life’s meaning. But in these relationships, so critical to our well-being, might we also detect the workings, even directives, of biology? This book, a rare melding of human and animal research and theoretical and empirical science, ventures into the most interesting realms of behavioral biology to examine the intimate role of endocrinology in social relationships.

The importance of hormones to reproductive behavior—from breeding cycles to male sexual display—is well known. What this book considers is the increasing evidence that hormones are just as important to social behavior. Peter Ellison and Peter Gray include the latest findings—both practical and theoretical—on the hormonal component of both casual interactions and fundamental bonds. The contributors, senior scholars and rising scientists whose work is shaping the field, go beyond the proximate mechanics of neuroendocrine physiology to integrate behavioral endocrinology with areas such as reproductive ecology and life history theory. Ranging broadly across taxa, from birds and rodents to primates, the volume pays particular attention to human endocrinology and social relationships, a focus largely missing from most works of behavioral endocrinology.

A majority of evolutionary biologists believe that we now can envision our biological predecessors—not the first, but nearly the first, living beings on Earth. Life from an RNA World is about these vanished forebears, sketching them in the distant past just as their workings first began to resemble our own. The advances that have made such a pursuit possible are rarely discussed outside of bio-labs. So here, says author Michael Yarus, is an album for interested non-biologists, an introduction to our relatives in deep time, slouching between the first rudimentary life on Earth and the appearance of more complex beings.

The era between, and the focus of Yarus’ work, is called the RNA world. It is RNA (ribonucleic acid)—long believed to be a mere biologic copier and messenger—that offers us this glimpse into our ancient predecessors. To describe early RNA creatures, here called “ribocytes” or RNA cells, Yarus deploys some basics of molecular biology. He reviews our current understanding of the tree of life, examines the structure of RNA itself, explains the operation of the genetic code, and covers much else—all in an effort to reveal a departed biological world across billions of years between its heyday and ours.

Courting controversy among those who question the role of “ribocytes”—citing the chemical fragility of RNA and the uncertainty about the origin of an RNA synthetic apparatus—Yarus offers an invaluable vision of early life on Earth. And his book makes that early form of life, our ancestor within, accessible to all of us.

What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have “made sense” of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller’s aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity—particularly in the discipline of developmental biology.

In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an “explanation” of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations.

A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

The contributions to this volume attempt to apply different aspects of Ilya Prigogine's Nobel-prize-winning work on dissipative structures to nonchemical systems as a way of linking the natural and social sciences. They address both the mathematical methods for description of pattern and form as they evolve in biological systems and the mechanisms of the evolution of social systems, containing many variables responding to subjective, qualitative stimuli.

The mathematical modeling of human systems, especially those far from thermodynamic equilibrium, must involve both chance and determinism, aspects both quantitative and qualitative. Such systems (and the physical states of matter which they resemble) are referred to as self-organized or dissipative structures in order to emphasize their dependence on the flows of matter and energy to and from their surroundings. Some such systems evolve along lines of inevitable change, but there occur instances of choice, or bifurcation, when chance is an important factor in the qualitative modification of structure. Such systems suggest that evolution is not a system moving toward equilibrium but instead is one which most aptly evokes the patterns of the living world.

The volume is truly interdisciplinary and should appeal to researchers in both the physical and social sciences. Based on a workshop on dissipative structures held in 1978 at the University of Texas, contributors include Prigogine, A. G. Wilson, Andre de Palma, D. Kahn, J. L. Deneubourgh, J. W. Stucki, Richard N. Adams, and Erick Jantsch.

The papers presented include Allen, "Self-Organization in the Urban System"; Robert Herman, "Remarks on Traffic Flow Theories and the Characterization of Traffic in Cities"; W. H. Zurek and Schieve, "Nucleation Paradigm: Survival Threshold in Population Dynamics"; De Palma et al., "Boolean Equations with Temporal Delays"; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegin, "Energy Analysis and Technology Assessment"; Magoroh Maruyama, "Four Different Causal Meta-types in Biological and Social Sciences"; and Jantsch, "From Self-Reference to Self-Transcendence: The Evolution of Self-Organization Dynamics."

An eminent pioneer of modern protein chemistry looks back on six decades in biochemical research and education to advance stimulating thoughts about science—how it is practiced, how it is explained, and how its history is written. Taking the title of his book from Robert Boyle’s classic, The Sceptical Chymist (1661), and Joseph Needham’s The Sceptical Biologist (1929), Joseph Fruton brings his own skeptical vision to bear on how chemistry and biology interact to describe living systems.

Scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists will seize upon the questions Fruton raises: What is the nature of the tension between the chemical and the biological sciences? What are the roots and future direction of molecular biology? What is the proper place of expert scientists in the historiography of science? How does the “scientific method” really work in practice? These and many other topics are fair game for this author’s wise critiques. In a stimulating final chapter, Fruton analyzes the evolution of key terms and symbols—the conceptual underpinnings used in the biochemical literature.