EMBRYOGENESIS EXPLAINED - Hardcover

This book began with Dick's original work The Hierarchical Genome. HG was a broad and somewhat technical exploration of how differentiation waves can explain and unify many puzzling aspects of genetics, embryology and evolution. It soon became clear that HG was hard for people without a background in all these fields to absorb. Those who were not biologists by training came to us asking for succinct explanations of what was known about how embryos worked so they could apply their unique skill sets from diverse fields like bioinformatics, computer science, physics, engineering and mathematics to embyrogenesis. These repeated background explanations eventually became a set covering anatomy, genetics, and biochemistry. I gave these explanations as a series of eight lectures in a course trying to bring HG to an audience of scientists with no background in biology. Dick gave supplemental lectures on the implications of our work for evolution and physics. The course grew until it became an official "for credit" graduate course with Wayne State University in Detroit. The material also became the basis for Embryogenesis Explained.Biology is not an easy science for those who don't have the background. When reading biological literature one finds there is a lot jargon and vocabulary specific to the field and there are concepts that are simply accepted as factual without explanation and a rich history behind the vocabulary and concepts that can appear incomprehensible and even nonsensicial to an outsider. (They actually named a gene Sonic Hedgehog?) As an undergraduate student learning this stuff I was given the book Recombinant DNA by James D. Watson which gently and thoroughly took me from the basics of DNA structure right through to understanding the latest breakthroughs in the field. Reading that book was such a pleasure compared to the typical biology textbook that I decided that if I ever wrote a biology book I would try my best to do in that style. Dick worked so hard on it with me because of how important it is to really understand and explain embryogenesis. If you started this book with no formal training in biology and you find you can finish it appreciating the wonder, beauty and glory of embryology, then we will have succeeded.

The greatest mystery of life is how a single fertilized egg develops into a fully functioning, sometimes conscious multicellular organism. Embryogenesis Explained offers a new theory of how embryos build themselves, and combines simple physics with the most recent biochemical and genetic breakthroughs, based on their discovery of differentiation waves. The authors explain their ideas in a form accessible to the lay person and the broad spectrum of scientists and engineers. Readers are prompted to question whether existing concepts of explanation in molecular developmental biology are adequate to the task. The book examines the history of the belief that there is something special about life that is either outside the realm of science or requires new laws of nature. The different subjects of development, physics, genetics and evolution are unified to explain the major unanswered scientific question of our time.