John Tyler Bonner
03 May 1997 12:20American developmental biologist, with a special devotion to cellular slime molds. Writes very good quasi-popular books. Edited the abridged edition of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form, which is the one you usually see in used bookstores.
- Recommended:
- The Cellular Slime Molds [No, honestly, they're fascinating creatures, and despite being thirty years old, this is the most up-to-date full-length study of them.]
- The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection [Review]
- The Evolution of Culture in Animals [post-Dawkins, and even uses the word "meme," but more interested in why anything should evolve the ability to have culture at all, and how it happened, than in the content or dynamics of culture as such.]
- Life Cycles [Part autobiography, part summary of his idea on development, especially the notion that what evolves is the entire life-cycle of the organism]
- Morphogenesis: an Essay on Development [1952; a fascinating view of what biology looked like before the molecular revolution swept all before it]
- On Development: The Biology of Form [An attempt to synthesize how organisms develop the way they do with evolutionary considerations about why they do so. Much of this is revisited, with less technical detail, in Life Cycles.]
- To read:
- Cells and Societies
- First Signals
- The Ideas of Biology
- Sixty Years of Biology
- Size and Cycle
- Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales [Blurb, introduction]
