The Mermaid’s Tale

Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things

Kenneth M. Weiss, Anne V. Buchanan, Kenneth M. Weiss and Anne V. Buchanan Weiss; Buchanan

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780674031937
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674270824
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Even after 150 years, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is irresistibly compelling. But how can this idea—in which competition prevails—be consistent with all that we know about the thoroughly cooperative nature of life at the genetic and cellular level? This book reconciles these discrepancies.

Assembling a set of general principles, authors Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan build a comprehensive, unified theory that applies on the evolutionary time scale but also on the developmental and ecological scales where daily life is lived, and cells, organisms, and species interact. They present this story through a diversity of examples spanning the fundamental challenges that organisms have faced throughout the history of life. This shows that even very complex traits can be constructed simply, based on these principles. Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, The Mermaid's Tale shows how life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The book reveals that the focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time—a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One. The Time of Life: A Broadening Perspective
• Part Two. The Logic of Life: Complexity Made Simply
• Part Three. The Consistency of Life: EcoDevoEvo
• Appendix A. Some of the Codes Contained in DNA and RNA: Appendix to Chapter 4
• Appendix B. The Hox Code and Axial Patterning: Appendix to Chapter 7
• Appendix C. The Logic of Image Detection: Appendix to Chapter 9
• Notes
• Suggested Reading by General Category
• References
• Index