Biological Clocks

by Arthur T. Winfree

Book Overview

Hardcover Book, 199 pages. 9.75" w x 9.75" tall. Full colour illustrations, charts, diagrams. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 071675018X
• ISBN13: 9780716750185
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Scientific American Library
• Length: 199 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Highly collectable

Here you will find the best available presentation, withclear colorful diagrams, of everything about advancing anddelaying biological clocks. There are surprisingly simpleprinciples, though they are unexpected, being topologicallysubtle. Plenty of examples are given in this and that species,ending with the prediction that all the same will eventuallybe found in Man. That actually happened a few years after this1986 book circulated. There is a pretty good chapter on humansleep/wake timing, too, some comments on jet-lag that shouldhelp dispel rampant superstition on that subject, and some chapters on biochemical and chemical oscillators. None of it is outdated: it seems to be the lastword on these topics. But a big thing is missing. Nothing isfound here about the molecular genetics of the circadian clock.That is because all that was discovered in the 1990s. For a timelyupdate see Chapter 19 in the same author's "Geometry of Biological Time" published in 2001.If you can get a copy of this out-of-print book (Scientific American Library sold about 40,000 then went out of business)it is well worth having just for the pictures in which theprinciples of phase resetting are finally made clear, as donenowhere else, in three-dimensional brilliant color codes.