Biology A Guide to the Natural World

9780131426337

0131426338

From the Author Book titles may be the first thing anyreader sees in a book, but they're often the last thing an author ponders. Not so with Biology: A Guide to the Natural World.The title arrived fairly early on, courtesy of the muse, and then stuck because it so aptly expresses what I think is special about this book. Flip through these pages, and you'll see all the elements that students and teachers look for in any modern introductory textbook--rich, full-color art, an extensive study apparatus, and a full complement of digital learning tools. When you leaf slowly through the book and start to read a little of it, however, I think that something a little more subtle starts coming through. This second quality has to do with a sense of connection with students. The sensibility that I hope is apparent in A Guide to the Natural Worldis that there's a wonderful living world to be explored; that we who produced this book would like nothing better than to show this world to students; and that we want to take them on an instructive walk through this world, rather than a difficult march. All the members of the team who produced both the first, and now the second edition of A Guide to the Natural Worldworked with this idea in mind. We felt that we were taking students on a journey through the living world and that, rather like tour guides, we needed to be mindful of where students were at any given point. Would they remember this term from earlier in the chapter? Had we created enough of a bridge between one subject and the next? The idea was never to leave students with the feeling that they were wandering alone through terrain that lacked signposts. Rather, we aimed to give them the sense that they had a companion--this book--that would guide them through the subject of biology. A Guide to the Natural World,then, really is intended as a kind of guide, with its audience being students who are taking biology but not majoring in it. Biology is complex, however, and if students are to understand it at anything beyond the most superficial level, details are necessary. It won't do to make what one faculty member called "magical leaps" over the difficult parts of complex subjects. Our goal was to make the difficult comprehensible, not to make it disappear altogether. Thus, the reader will find in this book fairly detailed accounts of such subjects as cellular respiration, photosynthesis, immune-system function, and plant reproduction. It was in covering such topics that our concern for student comprehension was put to its greatest test. We like the way we handled these subjects and other key topics, however, and we hope readers will feel the same way. What's New in the Second Edition? Much has changed in the Guidefrom the first edition to the second. Here's a brief listing of the subject matter that is new in the second edition. Increased coverage of the diversity of the living world, including a new chapter on animal diversity A new chapter on animal behavior Increased coverage of human evolution Coverage of many of the new developments in biotechnology: stem-cell research, the possibility of human cloning and xenotransplantation, the results of the sequencing of the human genome, and the controversy surrounding genetically modified foods Expanded coverage of the issue of global warming Updated or new information on such issues as Mad Cow disease, acid rain, and fad diets Some detail on these additions probably is in order. Anyone who writes a textbook has to carry out a balancing act between putting in too much and putting in too little. Following publication of the first edition, faculty convinced us that we had erred on the side of too little in connection with two topics: the diversity of life and animal behavior. Therefore, with t