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The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures
Can the structures that animals build--from the humble burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the Great Barrier Reef--be said to live? However counterintuitive the idea might first seem, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates in this book that many animals construct and use structures to harness and control the flow of energy from their environment to their own advantage. Building on Richard Dawkins's classic, The Extended Phenotype , Turner shows why drawing the boundary of an organism's physiology at the skin of the animal is arbitrary. Since the structures animals build undoubtedly do physiological work, capturing and channeling chemical and physical energy, Turner argues that such structures are more properly regarded not as frozen behaviors but as external organs of physiology and even extensions of the animal's phenotype. By challenging dearly held assumptions, a fascinating new view of the living world is opened to us, with implications for our understanding of physiology, the environment, and the remarkable structures animals build.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
J. Scott Turner
5 books17 followersAlthough I was born in Massachusetts, I grew up in California and remain a westerner at heart. After a mis-spent adolescence and young adulthood, I decided to go to college, earning a Bachelor's degree from University of California, Santa Cruz. From there, I went on to obtain advanced degrees in Zoology from Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Since then, I have been struggling to get back west, but my career keeps pushing me east. The furthest east it has pushed me has been to southern Africa, where I had a joyous several years as a biologist until I stumbled into fatherhood and family life, which was the best thing that ever happened to me. Since 1990, I have been on the faculty of a small forestry college in upstate New York, and reside in the small town of Tully, in a large renovated farmhouse with my wife Debbie, and for many years, my two children, Jackie and Emma, now launched. We have co-habited our house with several animals (3 three dogs in succession, and 2 cats that liked the cut of our jib and moved in uninvited). I venture regularly to southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia) for my research.
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May 30, 2011
Lots and lots of interesting, detailed information about interactions between organisms and their environments. A bit technical, but an educated layperson (like me) can read it if willing to concentrate. Turner has trouble integrating his findings with evolutionary biology, but that can be for someone else, I guess.
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