A critical look at evolution examines the slow process that ruled the rise and fall of the dinosaurs over hundreds of millions of years, the speedy process that causes drugs to fail because a disease evolves too quickly, and how human impact effects our own evolution.
The Extreme Life of the Sea exposes the eternal darkness of the deepest undersea trenches to show how marine life thrives against the odds, describing how flying fish strain to escape their predators, how predatory deep-sea fish use red searchlights only they can see to find and attack food, and how, at the end of her life, a mother octopus dedicates herself to raising her batch of young.
"Palumbi has hit upon...one of the most important but widely neglected issues of our time."―Edward O. Wilson Evolution is not merely the process that ruled the rise and fall of the dinosaurs over hundreds of millions of years. It also happens rapidly, so quickly and so 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, neatly sidestepping pharmacology. Insects adapt and render harmless the most powerful 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 The Evolution Explosion , Stephen R. Palumbi examines these practical and critical aspects of modern evolution with a simple, yet forceful style that contains both an urgent message and a sense of humor. Illustrated