Catching Up

Upon a recommendation of PZ Myers, I’ve been reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, by Sean B. Carroll. This is a new book about evolutionary developmental biology, a field which has undergone a revolution in the past couple of decades thanks to advances in molecular biology. Conveniently, it’s been almost that long since I was seriously studying evolutionary biology, and the book is helping me catch up to what we’ve learned since then. In the next two chapters I will learn about how the butterfly got its spots and the zebra its stripes. It’s great stuff.