Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Unnatural Selection

Unnatural Selection

Van Grouw, Katrina

Hardcover

Anatomy & PhysiologyBiologyNature Writing

Publisher Price: $53.00

ISBN10: 0691254052
ISBN13: 9780691254050
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Jun 27 2023
Pages: 304
Weight: 4.25
Height: 1.42 Width: 10.08 Depth: 12.05
Language: English

A lavishly illustrated look at how evolution plays out in selective breeding

Unnatural Selection is a stunningly illustrated book about selective breeding--the ongoing transformation of animals at the hand of man. More important, it's a book about selective breeding on a far, far grander scale--a scale that encompasses all life on Earth. We'd call it evolution.

A unique fusion of art, science, and history, this book is intended as a tribute to what Charles Darwin might have achieved had he possessed that elusive missing piece to the evolutionary puzzle--the knowledge of how individual traits are passed from one generation to the next. With the benefit of a century and a half of hindsight, Katrina van Grouw explains evolution by building on the analogy that Darwin himself used--comparing the selective breeding process with natural selection in the wild, and, like Darwin, featuring a multitude of fascinating examples.

This is more than just a book about pets and livestock, however. The revelation of Unnatural Selection is that identical traits can occur in all animals, wild and domesticated, and both are governed by the same evolutionary principles. As van Grouw shows, animals are plastic things, constantly changing. In wild animals, the changes are usually too slow to see--species appear to stay the same. When it comes to domesticated animals, however, change happens fast, making them the perfect model of evolution in action.

Featuring more than four hundred breathtaking illustrations of living animals, skeletons, and historical specimens, Unnatural Selection will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in natural history and the history of evolutionary thinking.

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