The Mermaid's Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things

by Kenneth M. Weiss, Anne V. Buchanan

Even after 150 years, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is irresistibly compelling. But how can this idea―in which competition prevails―be consistent with all that we know about the thoroughly cooperative nature of life at the genetic and cellular level? This book reconciles these discrepancies.

Assembling a set of general principles, authors Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan build a comprehensive, unified theory that applies on the evolutionary time scale but also on the developmental and ecological scales where daily life is lived, and cells, organisms, and species interact. They present this story through a diversity of examples spanning the fundamental challenges that organisms have faced throughout the history of life. This shows that even very complex traits can be constructed simply, based on these principles. Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, The Mermaid’s Tale shows how life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The book reveals that the focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time―a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.

Genres: Evolution, Biology, Science

336 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2009

About the author

Kenneth M. Weiss is Evan Pugh Professor of Biological Anthropology and Genetics, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at Eberly College of Science (Pennsylvania State University).

http://bio.psu.edu/directory/kmw4

Reviews

[Laurie]

This is a good overall discussion and explanation of the evolution of complexity and how evolution actually works. The authors stress that evolution works under constraints of the current organism, and also discuss the importance of chance and the dangers of attributing all evolutionary events to selection. The book did not tell me (a PhD in primatology/biological anthropology) much new, but would be a great book for someone with a biology background who wanted to brush up on evolution and read about specific examples.