Within a single captivating narrative, John Bonner combines an intensely personal memoir of scientific progress and an overview of what we now know about living things. Bonner, a major participant in the development of biology as an experimental science, draws on his life-long study of slime molds for an understanding of the life cycle-the foundation of all biology. In an age of increasing specialization and fragmentation among subfields of biology, this is a unique work of reflection and integration. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Beginning with the discovery of genes on chromosomes and culminating with the unmasking of the most minute genetic mysteries, the twentieth century saw astounding and unprecedented progress in the science of biology. In an illustrious career that spanned most of the century, biologist John Bonner witnessed many of these advances firsthand. Part autobiography, part history of the extraordinary transformation of biology in his time, Bonner's book is truly a life in science, the story of what it is to be a biologist observing the unfolding of the intricacies of life itself. Bonner's scientific interests are nearly as varied as the concerns of biology, ranging from animal culture to evolution, from life cycles to the development of slime molds. And the extraordinary cast of characters he introduces is equally diverse, among them Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, Leon Trotsky, and Evelyn Waugh. Writing with a charm and freshness that bring the most subtle nuances of science to life, he pursues these interests through the hundred years that gave us the discovery of embryonic induction; the interpretation of evolution in terms of changes in gene frequency in a population; growth in understanding of the biochemistry of the cell; the beginning of molecular genetics; remarkable insights into animal behavior; the emergence of sociobiology; and the simplification of ecological and evolutionary principles by means of mathematical models. In this panoramic view, we see both the sweep of world events and scientific progress and the animating details, the personal observations and experiences, of a career conducted in their midst. In Bonner's view, biology is essentially the study of life cycles. His book, marking the cycles of a life in biology, is a fitting reflection of this study, with its infinite, and infinitesimal, permutations. Table of Contents: Preface 1. The World of My Elders: 1900-1920 2. Becoming a Biologist: 1920-1940 3. Everything Peaks: 1940-1960 4. Revolution and Progress: 1960-1980 5. Coming Together: 1980-2000 Index Reviews of this book: A charming memoir combining autobiography and a 20th-century history of biology. "A gentleman and a scholar" aptly describes Bonner...Bonner's own lifecycle makes for pleasant reading and inspires a new respect for slime molds. --Kirkus Reviews Reviews of this book: Bonner has devoted much of his imaginative and creative biological research of the intervening years to cellular slime molds, which lead fascinating and, before Bonner's work, previously largely unexplained lives. His accounts of his and his graduate students' thinking and experiments convey much of the scientific approach to problems lucidly, and those of his travels, his vacations in Nova Scotia over the course of 40 years, and the many amusing and illuminating incidents in his life reflect a refreshing open'mindedness. This is one scientist's autobiography that manages to be simultaneously delightful and strikingly informative. --William Beatty, Booklist Reviews of this book: This charming and unduly modest book is part memoir, part distillation of 20th-century biology, as told by an eminent researcher, writer and teacher who witnessed much of it firsthand. Bonner...invokes life cycles and development, his specialties, to talk about the last century's gigantic steps forward in biology. He covers advances in biochemistry, population genetics and embryology; the discovery of DNA structure; and the human genome project. Against this parade of discoveries, Bonner considers his own career, which included everything from animal social behavior to evolution. --Publishers Weekly Reviews of this book: John Tyler Bonner had the luck to be born into a family that lived a charmed life, the fortune to find a lifelong passion and the timing to live at the heyday of his favorite subject. In his autobiography, The Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science, Bonner...smoothly integrates advances in biology during the 20th century with tales from a life that now stretches into its ninth decade. In simple but elegant prose, he revisits some of the most important biological advances, from embryology to molecular genetics. --Sally Squires, Washington Post Reviews of this book: Here is a man of prodigious scientific talent, who emerges in Lives of a Biologist as the best kind of scientist--a man fascinated by the things he is investigating, and finding great joy in them...This is a life well and fulfillingly lived, told with warmth and humor. --John R. G. Turner, New York Times Book Review Reviews of this book: This memoir by the great celebrant of slime moulds offers a fascinating overview of a century of biology. Bonner tells of changes in biological thinking, and his own pervasive influence in the study of life cycles and morphogenesis. --New Scientist Reviews of this book: [A] gracefully written memoir...Bonner, who began his career as an embryologist, provides many insights regarding the changing fashions he and others have observed in the field of developmental biology. --K. B. Sterling, Choice A gracious and immensely enjoyable memoir from an era in which scientists could still be gentlemen. Bonner's generosity of spirit shines through on almost every page. --Evelyn Fox Keller, MIT Imagine a wonderful writer who just keeps writing book after book and just keeps getting more and more readable with each one. That's John Bonner. Now he's done a memoir full of magic names from the past, where his kind humor softens a keen eye for human antics including his own. If you like biology, biography, and history of science and don't mind having fun reading it, then this book is for you. I would get two, one to keep and one to loan." --Mary Jane West-Eberhard Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Surely there can be few scientists with the breadth of knowledge, the puckish wit and the all-round modest good humor that John Bonner displays in this splendid memoir. Long may he write! --Anne Firor Scott, W.K. Boyd Professor of History emerita, Duke University A charming, personal account of the ascendance of the life sciences to their current dominance by someone who has been there. Few biologists grasp their discipline at as many levels as John Tyler Bonner does, and even fewer can claim as many firsthand encounters with the greats of the past century. The result is an autobiography that is both delightful and informative. --Frans de Waal, Living Links Center at Emory University This is a delightful memoir by one of the most charming and well-spoken biologists on the planet. John Tyler Bonner's career now spans half a dozen scientific generations, from each of which he has gathered friends and wisdom. In looking back, he illuminates both the story of his life and the story of life. --Jonathan Weiner, author of The Beak of the Finch and Time, Love, and Memory
The important role that randomness plays in evolutionary change John Tyler Bonner, one of our most distinguished and insightful biologists, here challenges a central tenet of evolutionary biology. In this concise, elegantly written book, he makes the bold and provocative claim that some biological diversity may be explained by something other than natural selection. With his customary wit and accessible style, Bonner makes an argument for the underappreciated role that randomness—or chance—plays in evolution. Due to the tremendous and enduring influence of Darwin's natural selection, the importance of randomness has been to some extent overshadowed. Bonner shows how the effects of randomness differ for organisms of different sizes, and how the smaller an organism is, the more likely it is that morphological differences will be random and selection may not be involved to any degree. He traces the increase in size and complexity of organisms over geological time, and looks at the varying significance of randomness at different size levels, from microorganisms to large mammals. Bonner also discusses how sexual cycles vary depending on size and complexity, and how the trend away from randomness in higher forms has even been reversed in some social organisms. Certain to provoke lively discussion, Randomness in Evolution is a book that may fundamentally change our understanding of evolution and the history of life.
While it began as a mystical interpretation of Jewish scriptural texts, today Qabalah is much more. As John Bonner writes in his introduction, "Qabalah is a metaphysical philosophy, or rather a theosophy, that sets out to answer a series of vital questions regarding the nature of God, His creation, and the place of man in His divine plan." It is a living, growing system of personal development. In addition, much of contemporary Western magick is founded on the work of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which based its ritual and teachings firmly in Qabalah. This scholarly introduction explores the mysteries of Qabalah through the symbolism of the Tree of Life and its four distinct elements: the three Pillars of Manifestation, the ten Holy Sephiroth, the Paths that run to and from the Sephiroth, and the Veils. For each Sephirah, Bonner provides detailed information on magical, astrological, and tarot correspondences - as well as how different religious traditions relate to the concepts contained in each.
Noted biologist and author John Tyler Bonner has experimented with cellular slime molds for more than sixty years, and he has done more than anyone else to raise these peculiar collections of amoebae from a minor biological curiosity to a major model organism--one that is widely studied for clues to the development and evolution of all living things. Now, five decades after he published his first pioneering book on cellular slime molds, Bonner steps back from the proliferating and increasingly specialized knowledge about the organism to provide a broad, nontechnical picture of its whole biology, including its evolution, sociobiology, ecology, behavior, and development. The Social Amoebae draws the big lessons from decades of research, and shows how slime molds fit into and illuminate biology as a whole. Slime molds are very different from other organisms; they feed as individual amoebae before coming together to form a multicellular organism that has a remarkable ability to move and orient itself in its environment. Furthermore, these social amoebae display a sophisticated division of labor; within each organism, some cells form the stalk and others become the spores that will seed the next generation. In The Social Amoebae, Bonner examines all these parts together, giving a balanced, concise, and clear overview of slime mold biology, from molecules to cells to multicells, as he advances some unconventional and unexpected insights.
This book was written to give hope and comfort to Christians who are not getting the victory over sin in their life. God has an exact time and date set for your deliverance. Wanting to feel good about oneself is pride. Accept God's will every day. All things will work together for good to those who love God, even your sins.
The enormous recent success of molecular developmental biology has yielded a vast amount of new information on the details of development. So much so that we risk losing sight of the underlying principles that apply to all development. To cut through this thicket, John Tyler Bonner ponders a moment in evolution when development was at its most basic--the moment when signaling between cells began. Although multicellularity arose numerous times, most of those events happened many millions of years ago. Many of the details of development that we see today, even in simple organisms, accrued over a long evolutionary timeline, and the initial events are obscured. The relatively uncomplicated and easy-to-grow cellular slime molds offer a unique opportunity to analyze development at a primitive stage and perhaps gain insight into how early multicellular development might have started. Through slime molds, Bonner seeks a picture of the first elements of communication between cells. He asks what we have learned by looking at their developmental biology, including recent advances in our molecular understanding of the process. He then asks what is the most elementary way that polarity and pattern formation can be achieved. To find the answer, he uses models, including mathematical ones, to generate insights into how cell-to-cell cooperation might have originated. Students and scholars in the blossoming field of the evolution of development, as well as evolutionary biologists generally, will be interested in what Bonner has to say about the origins of multicellular development--and thus of the astounding biological complexity we now observe--and how best to study it.
John Tyler Bonner, a major participant in the development of biology as an experimental science, is the author not only of important monographs but also of a wonderfully readable book, Life Cycles, which is both a personal memoir and a profound commentary on the central themes of biology. This volume of essays presents new material that extends the concepts from Life Cycles and his other writings. Its originality lies in comparing key basic biological processes at different levels, from molecular interactions through multicellular development to behavior and social interactions. The first chapter in the book discusses self-organization and natural selection; the second, competition and natural selection; and the third, gene accumulation and gene silencing. The fourth chapter examines the division of labor in organisms at all levels: within the organelles of a cell, within groups of cells in the guise of differentiation, within groups of individuals in an animal society, and within our culturally determined human societies. The work closes with a charming personal history of sixty years of changes in the field of biology, including the transformation in the ways that research work is funded. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Animals do have culture, maintains this delightfully illustrated and provocative book, which cites a number of fascinating instances of animal communication and learning. John Bonner traces the origins of culture back to the early biological evolution of animals and provides examples of five categories of behavior leading to nonhuman culture: physical dexterity, relations with other species, auditory communication within a species, geographic locations, and inventions or innovations. Defining culture as the transmission of information by behavioral rather than genetical means, he demonstrates the continuum between the traits we find in animals and those we often consider uniquely human.
The howling monkeys of Barro Colorado Island in Panama have a rudimentary language which serves the needs of their social activities. The red deer of Scotland, the seals of the Pribilof Islands, the beavers, the social insects, the army ants and termites, and lastly the colonial and single-celled organisms such as amoebae all meet the same basic biological necessities of feeding, reproduction, and social coordination. Though the means of meeting the requirements are amazingly varied, Mr. Bonner shows that these three functions form a basic pattern that can be recognized in amoebae, in monkeys, and in man-in fact wherever life occurs. Originally published in 1955. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
For those who live there, Earth is both paradise and prison, a place for people to live out their lives with no hope of leaving or knowledge of what exists beyond this world. Then on one otherwise uneventful day, two odd-looking men from another planet suddenly appear with an offer the citizens of Earth can't refuse: the power to travel into the unexplored frontiers of the universe. But first, the Earthlings must prove they can bring peace to their world and show love for their fellow man. At first, Earth's inhabitants are skeptical of their new friends but soon realize the magnitude of the gift these aliens have offered. They are given five years to end their wars and create an atmosphere of peace and social harmony needed to impress the union of worlds. While the world is filled with excitement, the Reverend Jimmy Jordan questions his faith in God, which leaves no room for the existence of life beyond Earth. He studies the Bible in earnest to strengthen his beliefs, and he discovers a startling secret concerning Earth's new friends, one that could have dire consequences for the planet and the people living on it.
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A discussion of life cycles and individual size in organisms, and of the relationships between the two, and of their conjoint role in evolution. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Professor Bonner has rewritten more than half of this standard treatise to take account of the great amount of recent research on the cellular slime molds. He has included a larger selection of material, more figures and new plates. The bibliography has been greatly enlarged. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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