The New Foundations of Evolution: On the Tree of Life

This is the story of a profound revolution in the way biologists explore life's history, understand its evolutionary processes, and reveal its diversity. It is about life's smallest entities, deepest diversity, and greatest cellular biomass: the microbiosphere. Jan Sapp introduces us to a new field of evolutionary biology and a new brand of molecular evolutionists who descend to the foundations of evolution on Earth to explore the origins of the genetic system and the primary life forms from which all others have emerged. In so doing, he examines-from Lamarck to the present-the means of pursuing the evolution of complexity, and of depicting the greatest differences among organisms.

The New Foundations of Evolution takes us into a world that classical evolutionists could never have imagined: a deep phylogeny based on three domains of life and multiple kingdoms, and created by mechanisms very unlike those considered by Darwin and his followers. Evolution by leaps seems to occur regularly in the microbial world where molecular evolutionists have shown the inheritance of acquired genes and genomes are major modes of evolutionary innovation.

Revisiting the history of microbiology for the first time from the perspective of evolutionary biology, Sapp shows why classical Darwinian conceptions centering on questions of the origin of species were forged without a microbial foundation, why classical microbiologists considered it impossible to know the course of evolution, and classical molecular biologists considered the evolution of the molecular genetic system to be beyond understanding. In telling this stirring story of scientific iconoclasm, this book elucidates how the new evolutionary biology arose, what methods and assumptions underpin it, and the fiery controversies that continue to shape biologists' understanding of the foundations of evolution today.

• The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
• Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome
• Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
• The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter
• Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History
• Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
• She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
• Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
• Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum
• Neuroplasticity (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series)