Problems of relative growth, - Hardcover

Huxley, Julian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0140116656 ISBN 13: 9780140116656

Publisher: L. MacVeagh, The Dial Press, 1932

Synopsis

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

This detailed study of the different rates of growth of parts of the body relative to the body as a whole represents Sir Julian Huxley's great contribution to analytical morphology, and it is still a basis for modern investigations in morphometrics and evolutionary biology. Huxley was the first to put the concept of relative growth - or allometry - upon a firm mathematical foundation, and since publication of this book in 1932, his work has been found to have greater implications than even he imagined. Problems of Relative Growth is at once a formulation of the basic principles of allometry and a survey of its many and various occurrences and applications. Examples are taken from such widely divergent areas as the development of the large claw in male fiddler-crabs, the size and number of points of deer antlers, heterogony in neuter social insects, the disproportionate growth of the human head from infancy to adulthood, and the formation of spiral shapes in certain mollusk shells and of the curved shape of the rhinoceros' horn. Starting from the fact of obvious disharmonic growth, Huxley formulates his first and fundamental law - that of the Constant Differential Growth Ratio. He then demonstrates that the distribution of growth potential occurs in an orderly and systematic way - that there are growth-gradients culminating in growth-centers. Other topics treated include multiplicative and accretionary kinds of growth, the role of hormones and mutations, and the relevance of the entire investigation to the problems of orthogenesis, recapitulation, vestigial organs, the existence of nonadaptive characters, physiological genetics, comparative physiology, and systematics. In theirintroduction to this unabridged facsimile republication of the original 1932 edition, Frederick B. Churchill and Richard E. Strauss place Huxley's work in the context of modern research in history and biology.

About the Author:

Julian Huxley (1887-1975), an English evolutionary biologist, was a prolific author and the leading figure in the mid-twentieth century effort to develop the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory. He was the first director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, and the recipient of UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society in 1958.

About this edition

• Publisher: L. MacVeagh, The Dial Press
• Publication date: 1932
• ISBN 10: 0140116656
• ISBN 13: 9780140116656
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1