Quirks of Human Anatomy An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body [Hardcover]

This book introduces students to basic concepts in evolutionary developmental biology, for undergraduate and graduate courses.Ever since the Middle Ages, anatomy has been a clinical subject. Now, the new field of evolutionary developmental biology is showing how body parts are encoded genetically and how they arose evolutionarily. Evo-devo uses our genome as a Rosetta Stone to decipher our past. Quirks of Human Anatomy takes the reader back to a time when there were no males or females, no arms and legs as we know them, and only rudimentary eyes. From that perspective our anatomical flaws make sense as the quirky outcomes of our peculiar history.Ever since the Middle Ages, anatomy has been a clinical subject. Now, the new field of evolutionary developmental biology is showing how body parts are encoded genetically and how they arose evolutionarily. Evo-devo uses our genome as a Rosetta Stone to decipher our past. Quirks of Human Anatomy takes the reader back to a time when there were no males or females, no arms and legs as we know them, and only rudimentary eyes. From that perspective our anatomical flaws make sense as the quirky outcomes of our peculiar history.With the emergence of the new field of evolutionary developmental biology we are witnessing a renaissance of Darwins insights 150 years after his Origin of Species. Thus far, the exciting findings from evo-devo have only been trickling into college courses and into the domain of non-specialists. With its focus on the human organism, Quirks of Human Anatomy opens the floodgates by stating the arguments of evo-devo in plain English, and by offering a cornucopia of interesting case studies and examples. Its didactic value is enhanced by 24 schematic diagrams that integrate a host of disparate observations, by its Socratic question-and-answer format, and by its unprecedented compilation of the literature. By framing the hows of development in terms of the whys of evolution, it lets readers probe the l