Noted biologist and author John Tyler Bonner has experimented with
cellular slime molds for more than sixty years, and he has done more
than anyone else to raise these peculiar collections of amoebae from a
minor biological curiosity to a major model organism--one that is widely
studied for clues to the development and evolution of all living things.
Now, five decades after he published his first pioneering book on
cellular slime molds, Bonner steps back from the proliferating and
increasingly specialized knowledge about the organism to provide a
broad, nontechnical picture of its whole biology, including its
evolution, sociobiology, ecology, behavior, and development. The Social
Amoebae draws the big lessons from decades of research, and shows how
slime molds fit into and illuminate biology as a whole.
Slime molds are very different from other organisms; they feed as
individual amoebae before coming together to form a multicellular
organism that has a remarkable ability to move and orient itself in its
environment. Furthermore, these social amoebae display a sophisticated
division of labor; within each organism, some cells form the stalk and
others become the spores that will seed the next generation. In The
Social Amoebae, Bonner examines all these parts together, giving a
balanced, concise, and clear overview of slime mold biology, from
molecules to cells to multicells, as he advances some unconventional and
unexpected insights.
