{"title":"Telmo Pievani","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"imperfection-book-telmo-pievani-9780262047418","title":"Imperfection","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49744873062673,"sku":"NGR9780262047418","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50100749959441,"sku":"GOR012662142","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51326643568913,"sku":"CIN0262047411VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53621508276497,"sku":"CIN0262047411G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262047411.jpg?v=1751037715"},{"product_id":"imperfection-book-telmo-pievani-9780262548359","title":"Imperfection","description":"In praise of imperfection: how life on our planet is a catalog of imperfections, errors, alternatives, and anomalies.  In the beginning, there was imperfection, which became the source of all things. Anomalies and asymmetries caused planets to take shape from the bubbling void and sent light into darkness. Life on earth is a catalog of accidents, alternatives, and errors that turned out to work quite well. In this book, Telmo Pievani shows that life on our planet has flourished and survived not because of its perfection but despite (and perhaps because of) its imperfection. He begins his story with the disruption-filled birth of the universe and proceeds through the random DNA copying errors that fuel evolution, the transformations of advantages into handicaps by natural selection, the anatomical and functional jumble that is the human brain, and our many bodily mismatches.  Along the way, Pievani tells readers about the Irish elk (incidentally, neither Irish nor elk), whose enormous antlers serve to illustrate the first two laws of imperfection; the widespread dissemination of costly or useless traits; and the neuroimperfection of the human brain—“a frozen accident of evolution that was not designed from scratch,” as Pievani calls it. He sizes up the alleged perfection of the human body, asking, for example, if everything in our bodies serves a purpose, why do we have appendixes? Why bipedalism, with the inevitable back pain that results? In this fascinating account, Pievani offers the first comprehensive explanatory theory for the ubiquity of imperfection.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753591251217,"sku":"NGR9780262548359","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262548356.jpg?v=1751453797"},{"product_id":"evolutionary-theory-book-niles-eldredge-9780226426228","title":"Evolutionary Theory","description":"The natural world is infinitely complex and hierarchically structured, with smaller units forming the components of progressively larger systems: molecules make up cells, cells comprise tissues and organs that are, in turn, parts of individual organisms, which are united into populations and integrated into yet more encompassing ecosystems. In the face of such awe-inspiring complexity, there is a need for a comprehensive, non-reductionist evolutionary theory. Having emerged at the crossroads of paleobiology, genetics, and developmental biology, the hierarchical approach to evolution provides a unifying perspective on the natural world and offers an operational framework for scientists seeking to understand the way complex biological systems work and evolve. Coedited by one of the founders of hierarchy theory and featuring a diverse and renowned group of contributors, this volume provides an integrated, comprehensive, cutting-edge introduction to the hierarchy theory of evolution. From sweeping historical reviews to philosophical pieces, theoretical essays, and strictly empirical chapters, it reveals hierarchy theory as a vibrant field of scientific enterprise that holds promise for unification across the life sciences and offers new venues of empirical and theoretical research. Stretching from molecules to the biosphere, hierarchy theory aims to provide an all-encompassing understanding of evolution and with this first collection devoted entirely to the concept will help make transparent the fundamental patterns that propel living systems.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50177316618513,"sku":"CIN022642622XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52603431911697,"sku":"CIN022642622XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022642622X.jpg?v=1750738086"},{"product_id":"serendipity-book-telmo-pievani-9780262049153","title":"Serendipity","description":"From the bestselling author of Imperfection, a theory of uncertainty as the very core of the scientific method and the essence of its wonder.  How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same thing happens often to scientists: they design an experiment and discover the unexpected, which usually turns out to be very important. This fascinating phenomenon is called serendipity, which takes its name from the mythical Serendib, a place from which, according to a Persian fable, three princes set off to explore the world, making chance discoveries along the way. In Serendipity, the award-winning author of Imperfection Telmo Pievani returns to weave a compelling story about the unexpected in science and its fascinating role in our understanding of the world.  Going far beyond the usual examples of penicillin, X-rays, the microwave oven, and Christopher Columbus, Pievani shows that the most surprising stories of serendipity in the history of science reveal profound aspects of the logic of scientific discovery. In this book, he presents for the first time: an archaeology of the idea; a taxonomy of serendipitous discoveries; an 'ecology of serendipity' (the surrounding conditions and factors that can promote it); and lastly, a theory of serendipity (why it occurs so frequently in so many sciences). From Zadig to Sherlock Holmes, Pievani shows that such great discoveries are not just the product of luck. Instead, serendipity comes from a mix of cunning, curiosity, sagacity, imagination, and accidents caught on the fly. Serendipity illuminates how much we don t know and how much we don't even know we don't know. Above all, Pievani reminds us that the human brain is of a piece with the world it is investigating a world so much bigger than our knowledge and it has also evolved within that world, adapting as it has to.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50275652927761,"sku":"NGR9780262049153","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000576672017,"sku":"NIN9780262049153","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52603867398417,"sku":"GOR014559424","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53375481020689,"sku":"CIN0262049155VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262049155.jpg?v=1751164812"},{"product_id":"multiplicity-book-telmo-pievani-9780262054638","title":"Multiplicity","description":"The awe-inspiring, little-known story of Nobel laureate Frances Arnold s discovery of directed enzyme evolution and how it was sparked by reading Jorge Luis Borges.  In 1976, a young engineering student from Princeton, Frances Arnold, happened upon Jorge Luis Borges s short story The Library of Babel while in Madrid the tale of a vast honeycomb of a library that contains all the answers to the mysteries of humanity. Little did Arnold know that the story would change the course of her life and the course of science.  In Multiplicity, Telmo Pievani explores her journey and the significance and scientific potential of Borges s legendary library and others like it. A famous evolutionist, John Maynard Smith, for instance, had fantasized about the existence of a similar enormous library: full not of books, but of proteins. And, in 1994, a philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, would devise a library no less confounding: one that collects all possible genomes, or all the possible combinations of the nucleotide bases of DNA. Why? Because by comparing all the proteins, genomes, and plants and animals that exist and have existed throughout evolution, what is finally revealed is possibility: what doesn t exist but could.  For Frances Arnold, the concept of such a library ultimately led to the discovery of the directed evolution of enzymes: a way of using nature s own method to produce new and better enzymes. The revolutionary idea transformed protein chemistry and biotechnology and earned her the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2018.  With literary echoes ranging from Borges to Italo Calvino, this slim book tells her brilliant story.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53680247079185,"sku":"NGR9780262054638","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780262054638.jpg?v=1782210028"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-telmo-pievani.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}