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Although they are among the most abundant of all living things and provide essential oxygen,
food, and shelter to the animal kingdom, few books pay any attention to how and why plants
evolved the wondrous diversity we see today. In this richly illustrated and clearly written book,
Karl J. Niklas provides the first comprehensive synthesis of modern evolutionary biology as it
relates to plants.

After presenting key evolutionary principles, Niklas recounts the saga of plant life from its
origins to the radiation of the flowering plants. To investigate how living plants might have
evolved, Niklas conducts a series of computer-generated "walks" on fitness "landscapes,"
arriving at hypothetical forms of plant life strikingly similar to those of today and the distant
past. He concludes with an extended consideration of molecular biology and paleontology.

An excellent overview for undergraduates, this book will also challenge graduate students and
researchers.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• Introduction
• Ch. 1 Adaptive Evolution
• Ch. 2 Species and Speciation
• Ch. 3 Origins and Early Events
• Ch. 4 The Invasion of Land and Air
• Ch. 5 The Aquatic Landscape
• Ch. 6 The Terrestrial Landscape
• Ch. 7 Divergence and Convergence
• Ch. 8 Tempos and Patterns Literature Cited
• Author Index
• Subject Index

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CHOICE Review

Niklas designed his book as a resource for a course in plant evolution, with the subject matter arranged in four parts. The first part is a brief introduction to the principles of evolutionary biology, intended as a review. The second part presents discussions of several notable events in the evolutionary history of plants: the origin of life, the invasion of the land by plants in the Paleozoic, and the origin of double fertilization in the evolution of the flowering plants. In the third part, Niklas uses computer simulations to demonstrate the effect of adaptive constraints on the evolution of cell and organ shape in aquatic plants, and the overall architecture of early land plants. The last part discusses divergent and convergent evolution and evolutionary rates. Niklas covers several interesting topics very well but does not provide a full overview of any aspect of plant evolution: the coverage of mathematical population genetics is very perfunctory, and there is no overview of fossil history to put the examples from parts 2 and 3 in perspective. Because of the irregular coverage of the field, the book will be best used as a source of supplemental reading for an upper-division undergraduate or graduate student. A. Whittemore; Missouri Botanical Garden