Into The Jungle

Epic Adventures in the Search for Evolution

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Not so long ago, most of the globe was uncharted wilderness. The exploration of the world’s deep jungles, vast deserts, stark badlands, frozen polar regions, and countless chains of islands are some of the greatest adventures of recent times, and the discoveries they yielded gave birth to and nourished the most important idea in biology: evolution.

Into the Jungle invites students to step into the lives of naturalists who followed their dreams, and often risked their lives, to explore the unknown and who made some of the most important discoveries about how life evolved.

Published to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, Sean B. Carroll's Into the Jungle: Great Adventures in the Search for Evolution brings the science of evolution to biology students at any level, regardless of their college major or career path. Each of the nine stories in this brief reader chronicles the dramatic adventures of an influential zoologist, geologist, paleontologist, or geneticist on their path to some of the most important discoveries that have shaped our understanding of how life has evolved.

Into The Jungle features these explorers:

  • Charles Darwin (around the world voyage, The Origin of Species, Chapter 1)
  • Alfred Wallace (voyages to Amazon and Indonesia, The Wallace Line, Chapter 2)
  • Henry Walter Bates (mimicry as evidence of natural selection, Chapter 3)
  • Eugene Dubois (the "missing link" ape-man in Java, Chapter 4)
  • Roy Chapman Andrews (dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert, Chapter 5)
  • Walter and Luis Alvarez (K-T asteroid extinction theory, Chapter 6)
  • Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (coelacanth in South Africa, Chapter 7)
  • Tony Allison (link between sickle cell and malaria resistance in Africa, Chapter 8)
  • Ditlef Rustad and Arthur DeVries (loss of red blood cells and evolution of antifreeze in Antarctic Fish, Chapter 9)

A Companion Website includes electronic files of original journal articles reporting key discoveries described in the book, questions to aid the analysis and discussion of these articles, additional photos, hyperlinks to websites of additional sources, and PowerPoint lecture slides.

(Note: Some material in Into The Jungle is drawn from the trade book Remarkable Creatures and some material is unique to this student-oriented paperback.)