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From beehives to burrows, animal building sheds new light on biology

From beehives to burrows, animal building sheds new light on biology. The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures. Illustrated. 235 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $47.50. enotype, phenotype, environment: the hallowed trinity of evolutionary theory. If you've had college biology you know the drill: the genotype comprises the set of genes in an organism, the phenotype is its physical manifestation and the environment serves as a kind of Grand Inquisitor, sitting in judgment on the small phenotypic (and therefore genotypic) differences among individuals in a population. ''Successful'' individuals are those that outcompete others within the environmental arena to leave more offspring, thereby passing on more of their genes to the next generation. Indeed, biologists often define evolution as a shift in gene frequencies within a population over time, and they view phenotypes as little more than clever devices employed by genes to replicate themselves. It is no wonder, then, that evolutionary biology is dominated by study of the genotype-population genetics, quantitative genetics and most recently a tsunami of molecular genetics. Progress in understanding the nitty-gritty of gene structure and function has been extraordinary. So why is it we still know so little about how organisms evolve?

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