Developmental Plasticity and Evolution Mary Jane West-Eberhard
"For the past century, evolutionary biology has focused exclusively on the ways in which genes and traits are propagated or lost, and has had surprisingly little to say about how new traits originate. In this masterful book, West-Eberhard provides a detailed explanation of how the origins of novelty can be understood in the light of recent insights from development, physiology, and behavior. This is a book of immense scope, full of interesting and exciting biology, in which West-Eberhard shows that the origins of novelty are both diverse and infinitely more interesting than what can be provided by random mutation. It will cause many to see evolution with completely new eyes and may prove to be the most important and insightful book about evolution since The Origin of Species. " Fred Nijhout, Professor of Biology, Duke University.
Mary Jane West-Eberhard is a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute whose primary research is on the natural history and behavior of social wasps. She studied zoology at the University of Michigan, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She is a past president of the Society for the Study of Evolution and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.