On Development is, as John Tyler Bonner says, “a book on ideas,” the ideas at stake in the contest to unravel the mechanisms of life. This fluent discussion of developmental biology synthesizes decades of intensive progress in specialized areas of the science: from the dramatic deciphering of the genetic code to detailed analyses of animal behavior patterns. Placing these discoveries in an evolutionary context, Bonner explores the continuities and the transitoriness of individual lives and individual forms.

He begins by discussing the ubiquity among organisms of developmental cycles and their universal properties, including senescence and death. He argues that the life cycle itself is an object of natural selection and shows how, in any species, it reflects the evolutionary tradeoff between energy requirements of the individual and reproductive efficiency of the species. Although nucleic acids are thought to be the ultimate and fundamental source of genetic regulation, Bonner points out that a massive amount of information required for normal development is not directly controlled by nuclear DNA during the life cycle. Each life cycle is governed by some immediate instructions from the genes and by many gene-initiated instructions that were given in previous life cycles and have accumulated in various parts of the fertilized egg. All of these instructions taken together govern the development of a new organism.

Acknowledging the great value of reductionist theories in biology, Bonner constructs his synthetic view of development without resorting to vitalist concepts or to hand-waving explanations. He draws examples and evidence from more than half a century of biological research, from sources as diverse as Spemann and Spiegelman. Certain organisms, such as the cellular slime molds, upon which Bonner himself has conducted a number of original experiments, and the social insects provide crucial examples of dramatic evolutionary increments in biological complexity and offer insight into the control mechanisms that make such advances possible.

Reproduction is among the most basic of human biological functions, both for our distant ancestors and for ourselves, whether we live on the plains of Africa or in North American suburbs. Our reproductive biology unites us as a species, but it has also been an important engine of our evolution. In the way our bodies function today we can see both the imprint of our formative past and implications for our future. It is the infinitely subtle and endlessly dramatic story of human reproduction and its evolutionary context that Peter T. Ellison tells in On Fertile Ground.

Ranging from the latest achievements of modern fertility clinics to the lives of subsistence farmers in the rain forests of Africa, this book offers both a remarkably broad and a minutely detailed exploration of human reproduction. Ellison, a leading pioneer in the field, combines the perspectives of anthropology, stressing the range and variation of human experience; ecology, sensitive to the two-way interactions between humans and their environments; and evolutionary biology, emphasizing a functional understanding of human reproductive biology and its role in our evolutionary history.

Whether contrasting female athletes missing their periods and male athletes using anabolic steroids with Polish farm women and hunter-gatherers in Paraguay, or exploring the intricate choreography of an implanting embryo or of a nursing mother and her child, On Fertile Ground advances a rich and deeply satisfying explanation of the mechanisms by which we reproduce and the evolutionary forces behind their design.

A giant of the discipline of biogeography and co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace was the most famous naturalist in the world when he died in 1913. To mark the centennial of Wallace's death, James Costa offers an elegant edition of the "Species Notebook" of 1855-1859, which Wallace kept during his legendary expedition in peninsular Malaysia, Indonesia, and western New Guinea. Presented in facsimile with text transcription and annotations, this never-before-published document provides a new window into the travels, personal trials, and scientific genius of the co-discoverer of natural selection.

In one section, headed "Note for Organic Law of Change"--an extended critique of geologist Charles Lyell's anti-evolutionary arguments--Wallace sketches a book he would never write, owing to the unexpected events of 1858. In that year he sent to Charles Darwin an essay announcing his discovery of the mechanism for species change: natural selection. Darwin's friends Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker proposed a "delicate arrangement": a joint reading at the Linnean Society of his essay with Darwin's earlier private writings on the subject. Darwin would publish On the Origin of Species in 1859, to much acclaim; pre-empted, Wallace's first book on evolution waited two decades, but by then he had abandoned his original concept.

On the Organic Law of Change realizes in spirit the project Wallace left unfinished, and asserts his stature as not only a founder of biogeography and the preeminent tropical biologist of his day but as Darwin's equal among the pioneers of evolution.