Hands and Feet: Grasping How Anatomy Is Sculpted by Evolution and Development
Hands and Feet is one of the precious few popular books to emerge from the nascent field of evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology. It offers lay readers a chance to savor this hitherto inaccessible world, which is as full of twists and turns as any fictional best-seller. This book proves that truth can be stranger than fiction, with its tales of walking whales, flying dinosaurs, and arboreal kangaroos. It highlights our simian ancestors, who were forced by changing climate conditions to come down from the trees, adopt a bipedal gait, forfeit their fur coat, and remodel their hand-like feet into springy cushions for running. Throughout the narrative, the author plays the role of a docent in a museum, pausing to patiently explain how each animal's specific quirks arose during its evolutionary history. Moreover, he pulls back the curtain to reveal the genetic devices that drove those changes. Like Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy in Oz, readers will be dazzled by the discoveries that researchers have made over the past several decades, and cameos of those pioneers are included to allow an appreciation of the ardor for adventure that compels them to explore. Darwin would have loved this book since it confirms all of his deductions about Nature.
Lewis I. Held, Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University. He is a geneticist who has taught embryology for 40 years. He apprenticed under David Botstein and Ira Herskowitz at MIT (BS, 1973), investigated bristle patterning with John Gerhart at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD, 1977), and conducted postdoctoral research with Peter Bryant and Howard Schneiderman at the University of California, Irvine (1977-86). This is his 7th book, following Models for Embryonic Periodicity (S. Karger AG, 1992) and five with Cambridge University Press (Imaginal Discs, 2002; Quirks of Human Anatomy, 2009; How the Snake Lost its Legs, 2014; Deep Homology?, 2017; and Animal Anomalies, 2021). He specializes in illuminating the mind-blowing findings that are emerging from the nascent field of evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology.
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