Krogh D. Biology. A Guide to the Natural World

Pearson Education, 2011. - 812 p. - ISBN: 978-0-321-61655-5
(5th edition)From the Author
Book titles may be the rst 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 teams who have produced the ve editions of A Guide to the Natural World have 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 through terrain 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 super cial 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 nd 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 Fifth Edition?
The numerous changes made to the Guide for its fth edition have added up to one global change in the book that longtime users may be able to perceive just by picking it up: It s shorter than it used to be.We had 791 numbered pages in the fourth edition, but this time around we have
725. The usual course for textbooks is to get larger as they get older, but we ended up going the other way in this edition after concluding that, in certain areas, we were providing more coverage than faculty thought was desirable. (You can see which areas have been trimmed by reading to the end of this section.) No book can perfectly meet the needs of all faculty with respect to content, but we ve done our best to produce a book that has only as much content in it as most faculty say they need. Apart from this change, the fth edition revision also includes:
- A greatly revised lineup of essays. Eighteen new essays have been written for this edition, most of them taking an applied slant. For example, on page 150, you ll nd the essay Using Photosynthesis to Fight Global Warming, which reviews some of the ways photosynthesis stands to be utilized as a tool societies can employ in their efforts to lessen climate change. Chapter 15 s Biotechnology Gets Personal provides students with some idea of what they could expect to learn by having their own genomes scanned for signs of predispositions toward sickness or health (page 274). Then the essay An Evolving Ability to Drink Milk should apply in a personal way to every student in a classroom, as it shows how the forces of mutation and natural selection have worked with human culture to place all human adults alive today into one of two camps: those who can digest milk and those who can t (page 294).
- An expanded set of review questions. Faculty have made clear how important review questions are to student comprehension of biology, and we ve responded by producing an edition that has more questions in it than any of its predecessors. The in-chapter So Far questions that made their debut in the fourth edition have been retained, while the end-of-chapter Multiple-Choice questions that existed up through the third edition have been brought back. The more detailed Brief Review and Applying Your Knowledge questions also appear at the end of each chapter and we re continuing to supply a host of review questions on the web.
- Stand-alone chapters on plants, fungi, the nervous system, and the endocrine system. In the Guide s fourth edition, plants and fungi were covered in a single chapter, and the same thing was true of the nervous and endocrine systems. In the fth edition, each of these subjects gets its own chapter. One effect of this change is that the book s endocrine coverage has been signi cantly expanded, as you can see by turning to page 532.
- A completely revised chapter on the immune system. The Guide s coverage of the immune system has been revamped from start to nish and as such is right up-to-date. As you can see by turning to page 550, the chapter includes not only information on how the immune system works but information on two promising forms of immune therapy. This coverage is then complemented by two new essays that stand to be relevant to student lives: Why is There No
Vaccine for AIDS? on page 566 and Unfounded Fears about Vaccination on page 568.
- New coverage of applied topics. Numerous applied topics are being covered for the rst time in this edition, often in the essays mentioned earlier. Subjects taken up include the intertwining of science and big business in the development of new cancer drugs (page 12); the nature of the new targeted therapies for cancer (page 168); the pluses and minuses of making genetic information public (page 206); a research breakthrough in the ght against herpes (page 386); endorphin release as a possible motivation for the use of tanning beds (page 495); and the controversy about how much vitamin D Americans ought to be getting (page 602).We also have a greatly expanded table on methods of contraception, which you can see on page
642. Last but not least, the fourth edition of the Guide had a section on avian u, but for reasons that may be obvious, the fth edition has a section on swine u (page 384).
- New coverage of basic science topics. The Guide s Chapter 14, on transcription, translation, and genetic regulation, is completely predictable in one way: Its section on transcription and translation never changes much while its section on genetic regulation never stops
changing (page 253). Writing about genetic regulation in an age of RNA interference and alternatively spliced genes is like posting dispatches from the Lewis and Clark expedition: You re not sure where you re going to end up, but reports about the journey are fascinating. Genetic regulation is, however, only one of the basic science topics that s been greatly revised in the fth edition. Chapter 15, on biotechnology, now has a long section on a topic whose name only came into wide circulation in the last couple of years: cell reprogramming. Material on both embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells is included in this section, which starts on page
270. Chapter 19 s coverage of the history of life on Earth has a greatly revised section on originof- life theories (page 342), and as you might expect the Guide s coverage of global warming and environmental issues in general has changed considerably since the fourth edition came out (page 704). In human evolution studies, a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome was completed in the last year, and the Guide s Chapter 20 includes coverage of that, along with an essay that explores the question of whether the discovery of cooking speeded up the evolution of human intelligence (page 371).
- A different way of approaching animals. For several editions, the Guide has covered the animal kingdom through the traditional means of taking students on a long walk through its major phyla. With this edition, we ve taken a different tack, in accordance with advice we got from faculty. All the phyla are still covered, but in much less detail than before.What s been added is a look across the phyla at four subjects: reproduction, egg fertilization and protection, organs and circulation, and skeletons and molting. The end result is not only a different chapter, but a shorter one something that was consistent with our goal of providing only as much coverage as faculty think is desirable.
- A different way of approaching plants. In the fourth edition of the Guide, plants were covered in three chapters: one in the book s evolution and diversity unit and two in the plant unit of the book, which was completely devoted to angiosperm anatomy and physiology. With this edition, some of the angiosperm A&P material has been moved to the plant diversity chapter, while the number of chapters in the plant unit has been reduced from two to one. Here again, we were following the advice of faculty, who told us we have been giving them more angiosperm A&P material than they needed. And here again the result was a reduction in the number of Guide pages.
- The elimination of animal behavior. The Guide has closed out nearly every one of its editions with an animal behavior chapter that was part of a larger ecology unit. Reviewing faculty liked this chapter and I certainly liked it, but it seemed to be used scarcely at all in non-majors classes and thus didn't t in with our goal of producing a book that has only as much material in it as faculty recommend. So with the fth edition of the Guide, we ve eliminated animal behavior altogether.