| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.20
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Art of Genes: How Organisms Make Themselves for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.20, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Enrico Coen's erudite code-to-carcass account of plant and animal development is set to change all that. Besotted with the way genes recreate forms over and over with unerring accuracy, we tend, Coen argues, to assume that the "blueprints" for these "copies" are entirely contained within the genes. Instead, Coen would have us imagine an organism's genetic code as the record of an artist's mood, immediately prior to starting a painting. Each organism, Coen argues, is like a painting--the unique product of creative genes, reacting constructively to the appearance of the "canvas" as it develops. What maintains fidelity from generation to generation is not the ability of genes to "copy" whole bodies, but their faithful recapitulation of artistic moods. Imagine Leonardo, gripped with recurrent amnesia, painting the Mona Lisa, over and over and over again. No painting that results is really a "copy" and neither is any organism.
At first glance, these artistic analogies appear dangerously anthropomorphic; so Coen has taken extreme care to define his terms and say what each analogy is meant to achieve. The result is not the easiest book--but who cares about that? Genetics is not the easiest subject and only Coen, to date, has captured its extraordinary beauty and complexity in terms the general reader can enjoy and--more important--trust. --Simon Ings --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"It is arguable that the most important advance in biology in the past twenty years has been the revolution in our understanding of the mechanisms of development.... Developmental biology has been transformed from a field in which ingenious manipulative experiments generated speculations about unobservable underlying causes, such as gradients and prepatterns, to one in which we have a very detailed knowledge of what is actually going on at the molecular and cellular level. Enrico Coen has written a book that attempts, with considerable success, to convey the essence of this revolution to the lay reader. It will also be of great interest to those biologists...who have only a superficial knowledge of the subject."TREE
There are many different ways of making things, from the highly mechanised and automatic, like the manufacture of a car, to the more open-ended and creative, as when a work of art is produced. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Coens book is successful in weaving the artistic analogy into a truthfully coherent and entertaining description of what is known about development. Initially I was worried by the title of the book, that the analogy would go too far, but I believe that the discerning reader will find the analogy only entertaining and sometimes helpful in providing a pedagogical reference frame.
The author is to be congratulated on producing a timely and beautiful book on a conceptually difficult topic.
Mark Burgess Associate professor, Oslo University College
Unfortunately - for me - the artistic metaphor was forced too far, too often, to the exclusion of the science. The author refers to hidden colours, and scents. What is wrong with a more correct scientific terminology? The use of a single colour to represent a certain cellular territory within a developing embryo etc also seems to risk suggesting an over-simplification. Surely it isn't just one gene / master protein / colour that is active.Coen was at pains to flog the artistic analogy for all it was worth even when it was not really worth it. To be honest my heart sank when forced to encounter another lengthy tract about Velasquez or Picasso or Leonardo or the artists interaction with the canvas.The problem with the whole analogy is the presence of the artist i.e. there is a conscious intelligence guiding the creative process which does not occur with the development of an organism from a fertilised egg cell.
However this is a fascinating subject and - on balance - a useful contribution.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
