Selfish Genes to Social Beings

A Cooperative History of Life

Jonathan Silvertown (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-887639-7 (ISBN)

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Selfish Genes to Social Beings is a new history of life told from a different perspective: cooperation. Beginning with the heroic story of rescuers in the post-earthquake rubble of Mexico City, Jonathan Slivertown reveals the universal rules of cooperation that apply throughout the history of life.

For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation?

Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with human society, Silvertown digs deeper, to show how cooperation is key to the cells forming our organs, to symbiosis between organisms, to genes that band together, to the dawn of life itself. Cooperation has enabled life to thrive and become complex. Without it, life would never have begun.

Jonathan Silvertown is an evolutionary biologist who has published widely on plant population biology. He is the author of eight books, including Dinner with Darwin: Food, Drink, and Evolution and, most recently, The Comedy of Error: Why Evolution Made Us Laugh. Formerly Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh, and Chair of Technology-Enhanced Science Education in Biological Sciences, he is now, following retirement, an Honorary Professor in the Institute.

Part One: Groups
1: Topos and Narcos
2: A river of glowing light
3: From selfish genes to social beings
4: Big steak or big mistake?
Part Two: Individuals
5: Matryoshka
6: Odd couples
7: Phytosympathies
8: Good Companions
Part Three: Cells
9: A Brand-New Bag
10: Three-card trick
11: That green new thing
12: From solitude to solidarity
Part Four: Genes
13: Ordering the primordial soup
14: Peas and Justice
15: Naked selfishness
16: Coda: the cornucopia of cooperation
Glossary
References

Erscheinungsdatum	13.04.2024
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	165 x 240 mm
Gewicht	458 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Evolution
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Genetik / Molekularbiologie
ISBN-10	0-19-887639-4 / 0198876394
ISBN-13	978-0-19-887639-7 / 9780198876397
Zustand	Neuware