Alert reader Bob has emailed me with the news that Eugene V. Koonin’s molecular evolution book, The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, is being offered for free on Kindle (it’s normally over fifty-one bucks). Now I haven’t read this book, but it looks legit, and if you’re into a book that covers the stuff described below, you have not a penny to lose. Bob also notes that these “free Kindle offers” usually last only 24 hours or so.
The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative genomics and systems biology. The author presents many specific examples from systems and comparative genomic analysis to begin to build a new, much more detailed, complex, and realistic picture of evolution. The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution; the key role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution and the consequent overhaul of the Tree of Life concept; the central, underappreciated evolutionary importance of viruses; the origin of eukaryotes as a result of endosymbiosis; the concomitant origin of cells and viruses on the primordial earth; universal dependences between genomic and molecular-phenomic variables; and the evolving landscape of constraints that shape the evolution of genomes and molecular phenomes.
If you’ve read this book, pray tell us in the comments how you liked it.
Despite all the badmouthing of e-books that some people tend to do, there is something very satisfying about seeing a book that you want online one minute and having on your kindle the next.
Already back to $43 for me :o(
(That was a 🙁 that went wrong!)
Still says $0.00 for me. Perhaps it’s location based I’m in South Africa
0.00 $ for me in Canada.
It was still 0.00 for me at amazon.com, accessing from the Netherlands.
Still free here. 7PM EST
Was free for me in Texas. I don’t have a Kindle, but I can use Kindle for Mac.
There is a whole category of free Kindle books! Who knew?
http://amzn.to/otIo9p
Project Gutenberg has a lot more free non-DRM’d MOBI/EPUB/etc. for works with expired copyright.
Thank you for the link – quite a number of good reads in there.
In My Opinion, best possible Project Gutenberg book is “Tent Camping in Siberia” by George Kennan…originally published in the 1870s. Fantastic and (at the risk of sounding pedestrian or familiar) awesome true tale of adventure, adversity, hardship, and survival.
Just a detail, in case you search for it: it’s “Tent life in Siberia”. Thank you for the tip.
thanks, will read it and give an update- kindle has turned out not to be the good deal I thought it would be with all my favorite books and new books costing more than the paperback editions…
I’m getting a Kindle soon. I hope the deal lasts long enough for me!
You can “buy” this (or indeed any other Kindle content) without having a Kindle: there are apps for Macs, PCs, iPhones, Androids etc for reading Kindle books. In fact, there’s no reason why everyone reading this should not get the book.
I even read them on the Nook! But I can also read them on the iPod Touch.
You don’t have to own a Kindle to download the book; all you need is an account on Amazon.com. Until you get your Kindle, you can download reader apps for the iPhone and iPad, Windows, and so on.
I took you up on this offer, it’s downloading now.
I just picked it up for free from the U.S. Amazon site, thanks for letting us know. It looks pretty good. Remarkably broad coverage. Here’s the T.O.C.:
Preface: Toward a postmodern synthesis of evolutionary biology
Chapter 1: The fundamentals of evolution: Darwin and Modern Synthesis
Chapter 2: From Modern Synthesis to evolutionary genomics: Multiple processes and patterns of evolution
Chapter 3: Comparative genomics: Evolving genomescapes
Chapter 4: Genomics, systems biology, and universals of evolution: Genome evolution as a phenomenon of statistical physics
Chapter 5: The web genomics of the prokaryotic world: Vertical and horizontal flows of genes, the mobilome, and the dynamic pangenomes
Chapter 6: The phylogenetic forest and the quest for the elusive Tree of Life in the age of genomics
Chapter 7: The origins of eukaryotes: Endosymbiosis, the strange story of introns, and the ultimate importance of unique events in evolution
Chapter 8: The non-adaptive null hypothesis of genome evolution and origins of biological complexity
Chapter 9: The Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Wrightean modalities of evolution, robustness, evolvability, and the creative role of noise in evolution
Chapter 10: The Virus World and its evolution
Chapter 11: The Last Universal Common Ancestor, the origin of cells, and the primordial gene pool
Chapter 12: Origin of life: The emergence of translation, replication, metabolism, and membranes—the biological, geochemical, and cosmological perspectives
Chapter 13: The postmodern state of evolutionary biology
Appendix A: Postmodernist philosophy, metanarratives, and the nature and goals of the scientific endeavor
Appendix B: Evolution of the cosmos and life: Eternal inflation, “many worlds in one,” anthropic selection, and a rough estimate of the probability of the origin of life
Koonin, Eugene V. (2011-06-23). The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (FT Press Science) (Kindle Locations 27-49). FT Press. Kindle Edition.
I wish he would lay off the postmodernism stuff. When the Kindle initially opened up on the preface: “Toward a postmodern synthesis of evolutionary biology.” My immediate thoughts were “Oh crap I want my money back”, but he seems to mean it in a loose metaphorical sense – basically pluralism would be a better way to say it. Postmodernism would likely include creationism and other crap.
£26 British pounds for me
see comment 19
I was able to download Kindle for PC, install it and then ‘buy’ this book (from Canada). I had to send it to the ‘cloud’ which apparently is my DSL line.
But it worked.
You can actually download it through the Kindle software. 🙂
The description and table of contents seem larded with buzzwords and buzz-phrases that only Suzan Mazur could love. I think I’ll pass, even for free. I have too many books that I suspect are good that I’ve yet to read.
Just “bought” it ($0.00). Thanks!
The intro reads like a crackpot, vanity book.
No human brain can describe let alone anything useful abt even 1 of these topics let alone mashing them all together.
Dunno, Koonin is fairly well-respected within his field. Even if some of us have strong disagreements with some of his positions…
We will study him more before we spend time to read book. So much science so little time. However, we are always skeptical of any one person promising a comprehensive review of complex topics with the promise of “synthesis.” Ho hum.
If that were true, teaching would be impossible. What I find impossible is reviewing a book before reading it, or at least sampling it.
I’m not qualified to judge its accuracy, but I can say it is a more complete balanced history of evolutionary thought than anything else I’ve read. And it does something interesting: it honors past research, but places it in the context of current genomic understanding.
Just downloaded it to my iPad via the kindle app.
Free is good!
Isn’t this a recent publication? I wonder if Amazon made a mistake? Well, their loss…already downloaded. I also saved the confirmation email stating $0.00 and saved a screenshot of the page (just in case they try to charge for it later).
Yes, I did the same thing – didn’t want an $50 odd charge I couldn’t challenge. But Amazon, just sent the confirming e-mail with the $0.00 price, so I guess it’s formal. So now it’s sitting on the kindle app on my iPad waiting to be read. Good deal – thanks
Just looked at the editorial review on Amazon and it had this nugget:
“The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution.”
Oy. Since when do evolutionary biologists consider nat. sel. to be the ONLY mechanism? And why is it so fashionable to try and demote nat. sel. to some sort of exaggeration or mistake? What gives?
While perhaps most realise explicitly that there’s more to evolution than selection (or should, anyway, or get their degrees revoked…), the other processes still very frequently get ignored in mainstream sources, or at least dismissed as ‘processes that don’t contribute anything interesting, just noise’. While selection is not to be ignored or demoted, it still is just one of the fundamental processes of evolution, the others being mutation (which actually introduces variation and innovation, unlike selection), drift, recombination (arguable — I think it just unlinks genes, which I doubt is strictly speaking ‘fundamental’), and perhaps migration. Furthermore, selection is all too often erroneously equated with adaptation (which is a process involving introduction of variation and sorting by selection), even by professional biologists.
How you split the processes has arbitrary elements (some people consider sexual selection distinct from natural selection), but I would replace migration by gene flow (also including introgression).
Sexual selection is a subtype of selection. Don’t see how it can even be considered distinct. Would love clarification on that, since it’s bothered me for a while now!
And totally cool with gene flow instead of migration — not used to thinking about spatial pop dynamics, so this is way outside my ‘territory’…
While selection is not to be ignored or demoted, it still is just one of the fundamental processes of evolution, the others being mutation (which actually introduces variation and innovation, unlike selection), drift, recombination (arguable — I think it just unlinks genes, which I doubt is strictly speaking ‘fundamental’), and perhaps migration.
you should be perhaps a bit more careful to separate mechanisms that generate variation from mechanisms that act on that variation.
mutation (all kinds) is a mecahism of generating variability; selection and drift are mechanisms that operate ON that variability.
likewise with horizontal gene transfer; just another mechanism of generating variability – it is not in conflict as a mechanism with selection or drift.
One recurring theme in the book is the assertion that most of the inventing of genes was done several billion years ago by bacteria.
Besides, I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘fashionable’ — we still feel like quite a minority in some places… 😉
Sweet, thanks for the heads-up.
I’ll probably never get around to reading it, but it’s nice to know its there at the click of a button (unlike my physical copy of WEIT, which I have to retrieve off the shelf).
Thankyou! I have been trying and failing to remember to check the Daily Deal every day.
(I really have to make it a cron job…)
Looks good, but it’s reduced to half price £26 in UK store not free 🙁
What to do:
** Go to Amazon.co.uk
** Click ‘Your Account’ [top right]
** Scroll down to the ‘Settings’ section & click on ‘1-Click Settings’ & you’ll be taken to the ‘Manage Addresses and 1-Click Settings’ page
[you may be asked to give your name/password to get to here, but that’s OK ~ do as you’re asked]
** Give yourself a US address & phone number by googling say a shoe shop & use there details but changed the unit number & phone number
** When you change your details & you will be redirected to Amazon.com
** In the Amazon search boxes at the top select ‘Kindle Store’ to the left & put “The Logic of Chance” in the right box & click ‘Go’
** The top result was correct. Click on it & there’s the book. Check that the page reads “Kindle Price: $0.00 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet. You Save: $69.99 (100%)”
** There’s a yellow ‘Buy now with 1-Click’ button to the top right. Underneath is a drop down menu. Select ‘Transfer via computer’ from the drop down & click the yellow button
** You’ll go to a download page & a dialog box pops up ~ select ‘Save File’ & ‘OK’ & the file is downloaded to your computer
** transfer to your Kindle via USB [or read on your PC with the free Kindle app for PC]
Note that you don’t NEED a Kindle to read this free book. You can download the free Kindle PC-app (amongst other options), and read it on your PC (or laptop, or phone, or iPad)
And yes, “The Origin” is available for free too (and most likely not time limited):
http://www.amazon.com/Selection-Preservation-Favoured-Struggle-ebook/dp/B000JML90Y/ref=sr_1_71?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1315265196&sr=1-71
And if you have a Nook: Barnes & Noble offers tons of free books too: if you need/want a book that you would consider a Classic, chances are you can get a free eBook version of it.
TONS of free stuff!
Bought $0.00! I do like free. 😉
Oh BTW ~ Bob’n’Jerry thank you
I got mine for free about eight hours ago (from Australia).
i am just starting the book but it is looking to be quite informative and fun. It is starting with something I have wanted to learn more about; how Darwin’s Theory evolved to become the early 20th century evolutionary theories of the modern synthesis. Got to get to back to reading.
Wow! I didn’t know theree were free ebooks and I also didn’t know that I could read them on my PC. This is great for me, since I live in a virtually library-less and bookstore-less country.
Looking quickly at the book, I was disappointed that it does not talk at all about the genetics of the speciation process.
Plenty more here at Project Guttenberg, among other sites…
http://www.gutenberg.org/
If there was a Nobel prize for moving the goalposts…
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/09/adam-and-eve-and-ted-and-alice.html
Who is that guy? Utter rubbish.
I just downloaded it into my Kindle for free from Amazon here in Kentucky, USA as of 11 PM EDT 9/5/2011. Despite any (real or imagined) possible shortcomings the book (may or may not) have, it looks at first examination to be certainly worth WAY more than the price!
Gotta agree with you!
I think the free offer has closed (Sept 6th, 8.15 am British time). Can anyone deny this or confirm it? Even after following Michael Fisher’s instructions above, and logging in from an American address, I see the price as $42.86.
It still shows up as free for me in the Netherlands (9:53 British). Did you try looking at Amazon.com?
It’s still available (Tuesday noon in Sweden).
I guess you need to follow the link in the above article which takes you to the US amazon.com rather than the UK version.
On the Richard Dawkins forum someone said the following works, but I suppose you have to be willing to be dishonest and effectively steal the book 🙂
Comment 15 by Michael Fisher
What to do if you’re Amazon accnt is not US:
** On the Amazon page click ‘Your Account’ [top right]
** Scroll down to the ‘Settings’ section & click on ’1-Click Settings’ & you’ll be taken to the ‘Manage Addresses and 1-Click Settings’ page [you may be asked to give your name/password to get to here, but that’s OK ~ do as you’re asked]
** Find yourself a US address & phone number by googling say a shoe shop & use their details [but change the unit number & phone number slightly]
** Change your address details & you will be redirected to Amazon.com
** In the Amazon search boxes at the top select ‘Kindle Store’ to the left & put “The Logic of Chance” in the right box & click ‘Go’
** Select the correct result. Check that the page reads “Kindle Price: $0.00 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet. You Save: $69.99 (100%)”
** There’s a yellow ‘Buy now with 1-Click’ button to the top right. Underneath is a drop down menu. Select ‘Transfer via computer’ from the drop down & click the yellow button
** You’ll go to a download page & a dialog box pops up ~ select ‘Save File’ & ‘OK’ & the file is downloaded to your computer
** transfer to your Kindle via USB [or read on your PC with the free Kindle app for PC]
One doen’t need to be in the US to have a US Amazon account. Just start an account of Amazon.com in any country. The Netherlands worked. I got the book directly on my Amazon account after downloading Kindle for PC.
One other site – remember the Darwin Correspondence Project website, plus the full text of all his writings –
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/
It really is a great site!
… and a Darwin Finches T-Shirt –
http://babbletees.com/products/darwin-finches-t-shirt-1?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150220081050965_17263597_10150241122800965
About the book by Koonin:
Box 13.1
Postmodern reassessment of some central propositions of Darwin and Modern Synthesis
Contrast 1
OLD:
The material for evolution is provided primarily by random, heritable variation.
NEW:
Only partly true. The repertoire of relevant random changes greatly expanded to include …..
More importantly, (quasi) directed (Lamarckian) variation is recognized as a major factor in evolution.
The first sentence in NEW seems to suppose that OLD was about single nucleotide changes. This misunderstanding of heritable is common in ‘postmodern circles’.
The second sentence in NEW has not enough foundation in table 9.1 (Lamarckian and quasi-Lamarckian phenomena) to justify the ‘major factor in evolution’ found here.
Box 13.1: Contrast 5
OLD:
Evolution by natural selection tends to produce increasingly complex adaptive features of organisms, hence progress is a general trend in evolution.
NEW:
False
I don’t think ‘progress is a general trend in evolution’ was ever part of evolutionary biology in whatever version.
The book is a molecular biologist’s book, what might explain the lack of interest in selection. People from the ecological side will be more interested in selection.
The book is a molecular biologist’s book, what might explain the lack of interest in selection. People from the ecological side will be more interested in selection.
Maybe, but what you quoted from the book is blatant error.
I’ll have to take a close look at this; it might not have been a good idea for both PZ and Jerry to recommend this book unread.
No, it isn’t a “blatant error”. You might not agree with Koonin’s take (I’m pretty skeptical of it myself), but there is a real debate among evolutionary biologists on these issues, especially among those who work in molecular evolution and genomics. The fact that most evolutionary popularizers seem to be zoologists unfortunately gives an incorrect notion that the Modern Synthesis has no current detractors.
This is mentioned in the book, particularly in regard to the tree of life. What Koonin argues is that most evolutionary innovation happened long ago in microbes, perhaps even before current cell structure was established.
BAH! Used our NY office address deleted my UK addresses but still $43
If you read Russian, almost everything is free, in several formats (e.g., FB2, Mobi, Epub).
I was looking into this a bit further, and various Russian book sites also seem to have quite a few books in English — including current ones — available for free download, mostly more popular titles. I just found The God Delusion in pdf, for example.
Since the legitimacy of such downloads is questionable at best, I won’t include any URLs.
I just got it for free here in Texas.
Look forward to checking out the book, and I hope that its a serious book. Some of the chapter titles have titles that sound against the modern synthesis. I am not qualified to judge such things, however.
Perhaps we will have some discussion after we’ve all had a chance to look at the book?
Just got it free. 10:30 Mountain Daylight Time.
Billy Oldham
There are sites focused on Open Access books, I like this one: http://www.intechweb.org/subject/biological-sciences/
Well I downloaded it and tried to read some of it. I’m the farthest thing from a biologist but I have read several popularization type books on evolution (Dawkins and a couple others) as well as most of Darwin’s *Origins*. I also have an academic background in philosophy.
So far, I am finding the book almost totally unreadable. Badly written, repetitive, and yet somehow unclear to a distressing degree. I’d be interested if others have a more positive reaction.
It would seem impossible to get this if you’re running Linux. Amazon seems unwilling to download the book unless you have a Kindle or a Kindle app installed, and it offers no Kindle app for Linux systems that I can see!
You don’t need Kindle installed to download a Kindle book
Also you can read a Kindle book on the Linux OS:
1] Install Chrome browser & then…
2] Use Kindle Cloud Reader
It would seem impossible to get this if you’re running Linux.
Nothings is impossible if you control your own bits. Install wine-devel and winetricks using yum or your favorite package manager. Then:
bash$ winetricks kindle
bash$ wine kindle
My reaction is entirely the opposite in all regards.
I don’t see anything entirely new, but things I have only seen briefly in internet arguments have been clarified for me.
I’m not sure how biologists will view it, but as a bystander I’d put it in the same league as Mayr and Dawkins.
Agree, seems mainly crackpot.
I am getting so sick of this discrimination! I am in the UK so if I go to Amazon.com to get my free book I am told I have to go to Amazon.co.uk, where the book costs £26! Perhaps I should be grateful, after all at least I can get the book at all! Many books that are available on Kindle on the US site aren’t available at all on the UK site. Grrr…
Perhaps you should investigate using a proxy server. Google it. I don’t know if that will work in this case, but I have seen numerous references to workarounds at Pharyngula and at Dawkins’ site.
My assumption is that this is a marketing move designed to get some internet buzz going. The book is heavy lifting compared to most popular books on evolution. Lots of charts, graphs, and a few formulas. By the usual standards of such things, it will not sell to the general public.
In genomics and microbiology, Koonin is very well known. He basically falls into the Ford Doolittle camp, so you know pretty much what he is going to say: Horizontal gene transfer means there is no tree of life, the Modern Synthesis is ossified and needs to be replaced/modified, selection is overrated as an evolutionary mechanism, etc. Whatever it’s worth, if you haven’t heard/read Doolittle or Koonin discuss these topics, it’s worth a read.
That would only apply to microbes, and applied to them, it is probably true.
The book covers nearly every theory out there and is well worth reading.
Just to add some comments about the Koonin book from a non-scientist…
I consider myself a fairly prolific reader, with one of my favorite genres being “popular” science books, in the vein of Dawkins, Pinker, Zimmer, and of course WEIT. So I went ahead and downloaded the book. I’m up to chapter 5, and according to my iPhone Kindle app, I’m 17% through it (there don’t seem to be page numbers).
So far, I’m finding it interesting, but rather dense. His arguments sound reasonable while I’m wading through them, but then I find myself wondering “so what?” (again, I’m a software guy, not a scientist – so I could be missing the significance of what he’s saying).
For example, here’s a quote from the synopsis at the end of chapter 4:
“Certainly, adaptations are common and indispensible for the evolution of all life. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the overall quantifiable characteristics of genome architecture, functioning, and evolution are primarily determined by non- adaptive, stochastic processes. Adaptations only modulate these patterns.”
Yeah, so there’s random change, and then there’s selection based on the changes, right? I just don’t see (so far) what this very wordy volume is adding to my layman’s understanding of evolution. But I’ll keep reading and maybe have a different conclusion later!
Chris B