Biology: A Guide to the Natural World / Edition 5

by David Krogh

Overview

This book serves as the most successful introduction to biology published in the last 10 years, and remains the only one written and illustrated from the ground up. The "biological literacy" approach continues to be paramount—from the journalistic writing style and original, Krogh specific illustrations to the seamless integration of media A seven-part organization covers essential parts: atoms, molecules, and cells; energy and its transformation; how life goes on: genetics; life's organizing principle: evolution and the diversity of life; a bounty that feeds us all: plants; what makes the organism tick? animal anatomy and physiology; and the living world as a whole: ecology and behavior. For the promotion of biological literacy—to make individuals aware that they need it to participate in the workforce, make everyday decisions, and make informed choices at the ballot box.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900321616554
Publisher:	Benjamin Cummings
Publication date:	09/17/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	880
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

David Krogh has been writing about science for 27 years in newspapers, magazines, books, and for educational institutions. He is the author of Smoking: The Artificial Passion, an account of the pharmacological and cultural motivations behind the use of tobacco, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology. In 1994, he began work on what would become Biology: A Guide to the Natural World, and in 1999 he completed its first edition. Since then, he has produced three more editions of A Guide to the Natural World along with a second textbook, A Brief Guide to Biology. He holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and history from the University of Missouri.

Table of Contents

1. Science as a Way of Learning a Guide to the Natural World.

I. ESSENTIAL PARTS: ATOMS, MOLECULES, AND CELLS.

2. The Fundamental Building Blocks: Chemistry and Life.
3. Water, pH, and Biological Molecules.
4. Life's Home The Cell.
5. Life's Border: The Plasma Membrane.

II. ENERGY AND ITS TRANSFORMATION.

6. Life's Mainspring: An Introduction to Energy.
7. Vital Harvest: Deriving Energy from Food.
8. The Green World's Gift: Photosynthesis.

III. HOW LIFE GOES ON: GENETICS.

9. Introduction to Genetics; Mitosis and Cytokinesis.
10. Making Reproductive Cells: Meiosis.
11. The First Geneticist: Mendel and His Discoveries.
12. Chromosomes and Inheritance.
13. DNA Structure and Replication.
14. How Proteins Are Made: Genetic Transcription, Translation, and Regulation.
15. The Future Isn't What It Used to Be: Biotechnology.

IV. LIFE'S ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE: EVOLUTION AND THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE.

16. Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Thought, and the Evidence for Evolution: An Introduction to Evolution.
17. The Means of Evolution: Microevolution.
18. The Outcomes of Evolution: Macroevolution.
19. A Slow Unfolding: The History of Life on Earth.
20. Pond Dwellers, Log Eaters, and Self-Feeders: the Diversity of Life.
21. Movers and Shakers: The Animal Kingdom.

V. A BOUNTY THAT FEEDS US ALL: PLANTS.

22. An Introduction to Flowering Plants.
23. Form and Function in Flowering Plants.

VI. WHAT MAKES THE ORGANISM TICK? ANIMAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY.

24. Introduction to Animal Anatomy and Physiology: The Integumentary, Skeletal, and Muscular Systems.
25. Control and Defense: The Nervous, Endocrine, and Immune Systems.
26. Transport, Nutrition, and Exchange: Blood, Breath, Digestion, and Elimination.
27. An Amazingly Detailed Script: Animal Development.
28. How the Baby Came to Be: Human Reproduction.

VII. THE LIVING WORLD AS A WHOLE: ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR.

29. An Interactive Living World: Populations and Communities in Ecology.
30. An Interactive Living World: Ecosystems and the Biosphere.
31. Animal Behavior.

Preface

From the Author

Book titles may be the first thing any reader 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 World is 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 World worked 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 throughterrain 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 Guide from 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 this edition, readers will see expanded coverage of both topics. Where once we covered diversity in a single chapter, we now cover it in two, the second of which is devoted to animals. The diversity coverage has also been rearranged, so that faculty who want to review plants without going into the details of their anatomy and physiology can do so with the help of the book's first diversity chapter. Meanwhile, animal behavior got its own chapter in the second edition. Students seem to find this a fascinating subject, and their author did too, after diving into it. The Guide's diversity coverage begins with Chapter 20, while its animal behavior Chapter is 31.

Faculty and students also wanted more coverage of human evolution in the book, and to that end, we have substantially expanded our coverage of this subject. The long, last module of Chapter 19 is given over to it. I'm happy to say that we are as up-to-date as a textbook can be on this fast-moving field. Faculty who wanted to see coverage of the senses will find, in Chapter 25, a long section on vision as an example of our sensory capabilities.

Apart from expanding into new areas, the second edition of the Guide also needed to take account of new developments in biology. There has been plenty to take account of. As one who has followed perhaps a score of research areas for several years now, I can attest that there is no grass growing under the feet of biologists. The sequencing of the human genome has brought with it a tidal wave of new findings—new fields of biology, even. (It would be interesting to pinpoint the first published use of such terms as bioinformatics.) As a result, this book's biotechnology coverage, in Chapter 15, has changed greatly. It wasn't just the sequencing of the human genome that necessitated this change, however. Reproductive cloning has raised the possibility of human cloning and xenotransplantation. Meanwhile, the fight over genetically modified foods has greatly intensified in the past couple of years. Readers will find expanded coverage of all these issues in Chapter 15. Another fast-emerging and controversial field in biology is that of stem-cell research. This topic seemed a natural fit with the book's Chapter 27, which covers development.

With each passing month since the first edition was published, biology seems to have figured ever more prominently in other societal issues as well. Accordingly, the second edition of the Guide has retained and updated its coverage of such subjects as DNA fingerprinting, cancer, and acid rain, while adding new essays on such subjects as Mad Cow disease (Chapter 20), fad diets (Chapter 3), and human sexuality (Chapter 31). Global warming has emerged in the past two years as perhaps the planet's single most worrisome environmental issue. Readers will find updated and expanded coverage of it in Chapter 30.

Coverage of the Process of Discovery

One of the priorities for the second edition was to continue to impart to students a sense of how research results are arrived at in biology. Most of the book's chapters weave information on the process of discovery into explanations of what has been discovered. See, for example, Chapter 13 on Watson, Crick, and the DNA molecule; or Chapter 31 on proximate and ultimate causes in animal behavior. The first edition of the book also had a series of stand-alone "How Did We Learn?" essays, and these have been updated and expanded for the second edition. (See the box on animal navigation in Chapter 31.) We also noted that, while faculty and students like these essays, they didn't like them interrupting the flow of a chapter's main text. Thus, "How Did We Learn?" boxes now appear at the end of chapters, rather than in the middle of them.

Electronic Media and the Second Edition

One of the most exciting features of the second edition concerns not what the book covers, but enhancements in its coverage that have been made possible by electronic media. Students and faculty have come to expect sophisticated media components in textbooks, but with the second edition of A Guide to the Natural World, I think we will exceed their expectations.

The book's media offerings for students can be conceptualized as falling into two categories. First, there are the CD-ROM Tutorials—well-named because collectively they function as a kind of book-length tutor. Each of them leads students through a series of related biological concepts with the help of the specialized teaching tool of animation. If, upon reading Chapter 14 on genetic transcription and translation, a student isn't able to visualize how transfer RNA and messenger RNA work together at ribosomes, he or she can turn to the chapter's CDROM Tutorial and see this process laid out, step by step, with all the kinetics presented in animations. This story, of manufacturing proteins, is a CD-ROM "learning module" for Chapter 14-one of four contained in that chapter's CD-ROM Tutorial. Each module walks students through a key chapter concept; each contains an interactive activity or exercise; and each ends with its own summary and mini-quiz.

All the CD-ROM Tutorials were developed by Mike Guidry and his colleagues at Light-Cone Interactive. Mike's team produced a tutorial for every chapter in the book, each one identified in the text with an icon.

Of course, students can turn to tutorial animations simply to make a given book illustration come to life; but they can also use the tutorials as just that—as learning sessions that employ interactive, step-by-step progressions. The proof here is in the pudding; take a look at some of the tutorials, and I think you'll agree they are a strong addition to the book.

Apart from the CD-ROM Tutorials, the Guide has, in its second edition, an expanded roster of the MediaLabs that proved so popular in the first edition. Produced by Peggy Brickman of the University of Georgia, these MediaLabs are aimed at making plain the linkage between biological concepts and real-world issues, and at fostering critical thinking about this linkage. A given lab starts by having students review, through a CD-ROM Tutorial, certain key concepts in a chapter. Then students are asked to investigate real-world issues connected to these concepts by going to suggested websites. (The cell cycle, covered in Chapter 9, maybe intimately involved in the initiation of cancer, but what environmental factors are most important in getting cancer going? A Scientific American Web page tells the tale.) Having done this digging, students are then asked to communicate what they have learned by writing brief essays on questions that are put to them. The book now has 15 MediaLabs, each integrated with the content of a specific chapter. Each MediaLab begins within the book itself (at the end of selected chapters), but then broadens out to the CD-ROM and the wide world of the Internet.

Many more digital tools are available to students in this second edition of the Guide. The book's website, developed by Prentice Hall's Andrew Stull, provides a host of resources. Students looking at any chapter at the website can click on a "Destinations" hyperlink and be presented with a rich roster of chapter-specific Internet links. Self-quizzes for each chapter also are posted on the website, with quiz questions divided into "basic" and "challenge" sets. (To make things easy for students, the CDROM Tutorials contain links to both the Companion Website and the MediaLabs.) Beyond this, there is a set of audio files that can be launched from the website. These are National Public Radio Biocast programs that have been integrated by their author, Bruce Hofkin, into each chapter in the book. Upon launching the Biocasts for Chapter 10, for example, a student can listen to a short program on a new technology that helps parents choose the gender of their child. This technology is connected to a basic concept covered in Chapter 10, sex determination in meiosis. Hofkin then brings the basic and applied science together in questions he poses at the end of the program.

All of these digital resources (and more) are available to students in the second edition of the Guide, but faculty have additional resources at their disposal. The Instructor's CDROM contains all of the key animations in the student CD-ROM; these are in turn part of a bank of images, known as the Media-Portfolio, containing every illustration and most of the photos in the book. The Media-Portfolio makes all the figures available in several formats, including PowerPoint slides that can be mixed and matched as desired, with figure parts, labels, and captions that can be edited. In addition, the Instructor's Guide and test-item file are embedded as a Word document in the CD-ROM, so that faculty can cut and paste what they need. Beyond these things, all the traditional media, such as transparencies, are available to faculty.

Notable Features in A Guide to the Natural World

Design and Illustrations

As in the first edition of the book, each chapter in the second edition is divided into numbered modules (1.1,1.2, and so forth), so that instructors can easily assign selected parts of a given chapter. The chapter sections are listed at the start of each chapter, and end-of-chapter summaries are indexed by section. On the first page of each chapter is a visual "filmstrip" that offers an intriguing preview of what's to come.

Flip through the pages of the Guide, and you'll note another useful design element right away: Text almost always occupies the top left of a page, with illustrations at the bottom. As a result, text continued from one page to the next is almost never broken up by a photo or illustration. Students reading text will not have their concentration broken by graphics when they turn to new pages.

Regarding the book's illustrations, I think A Guide to the Natural World is first-rate for reasons of both process and personnel. The process was that illustrations were once again constructed chapter by chapter in a collaboration between myself and artist Kim Quillin. Kim and I now have to communicate through electronic files, whisking them from one coast to the other, whereas in the first edition we communicated at a Berkeley Starbuck's. Kim moved back to her native coastal Maryland after finishing her Ph.D. in biomechanics at UC Berkeley.) But our method of working has remained the same: We revise chapters at an early stage, based on the illustrations that Kim comes up with, thus ensuring a tight integration between text and illustrations. Put another way, the figures in the book aren't just adjuncts to the text. Rather, figures and text have shaped each other in a back-and-forth process.

The Guide to the Natural World Team

Given all the names I've mentioned so far, it may go without saying that production of this book has been a team effort. It is my good fortune to have been given great teams for both editions of A Guide to the Natural World. So large is an effort such as this that there are many people I've never met who have put in long hours on the book. I've noted Kim Quillin and her role in the book's art program. Annie Reid served ably as the book's developmental editor—the person who looked over everything Kim and I came up with and said whether it worked, after which she put the revised product together in a package that could be made into a book. Chris Thillen copyedited the manuscript, patiently making sure that the English language was used correctly. Nicole Bush has been a fine production editor, bringing together pieces of art and blocks of text into the nicely laid out final product you see before you. Peggy Brickman not only developed the MediaLabs but also contributed greatly to the CD-ROM Tutorials produced by Mike Guidry and his coworkers. Thanks needs to go out in advance to Jennifer Welchans and Shari Meffert, who are just beginning to get the word out about the new edition of the Guide. Finally, we had great support at the top from Prentice Hall Editors Gary Carlson and Sheri Snavely, who managed the project on its largest scale.

Apart from these team members, more than two-hundred faculty have now carefully critiqued every word and image you see in A Guide to the Natural World. (Is any written work more carefully reviewed than a textbook? Peer-reviewed scientific papers are the only other contenders that come to mind.) The names of reviewing faculty can be found beginning on page xxxiv. Of these faculty, I need to make special note of the team of academic advisors who have provided advice not only on the details of the book, but on its overall structure and coverage. These advisors are listed across from the title page.

Finally, my thanks to all the faculty who used the first edition of A Guide to the Natural World in their courses and then let us know how it worked. Some of these faculty were reviewers, but some were instructors who sent in comments by e-mail or by old-fashioned letter just because they thought their feedback might be helpful. If they said the book needed some tweaking, we listened—the result being what you see in front of you. The main message from these faculty, however, was gratifying indeed. From them, we learned that we had done what we intended to do with the first edition of A Guide to the Natural World: We had created a book that their students could understand. Moreover, they said, we did this not by leaving out the hard parts, but by thinking carefully about how all the parts should be presented. Here's hoping that the second edition works as well.

David Krogh
Berkeley, California