John Alexander Moore

Subtitled "The Foundations of Modern Biology". This is a book of deep learning in the biological sciences, devoted to the history of biology. It is organized in four parts. Part One, Understanding Nature, discusses the birth of biology in Aristotle, the stifling of scientific advance by the advent of the religious world view in the dark ages, and the beginnings of revival with the use of the microsope in the seventeenth century. Moore is very wise in his identification of descriptive and theoretical approaches to science, but his historical surveys lack some of the nuance supplied by modern historiography. The second part is on evolution, and is interesting in the tests of Darwin's hypotheses, and is more an argument than the rest of the book. The third part, on classical genetics, was fascinating in its description of how cytology and crossing experiments came together to make the modern view of genetics possible. Crossing experiments in drosophila (Thomas Hunt Morgan) provided the theoretical basis for how genes assort and generate phenotypes, while the cytologists identified the chromosome and the basis of how a cell mechanisms perform the genetic sort. The final part is on embryology and differentiation, again a classical perspective from experiments early in the century.… (mais)