2: Highly collectable
Here you will find the best available presentation, with
clear colorful diagrams, of everything about advancing and
delaying biological clocks. There are surprisingly simple
principles, though they are unexpected, being topologically
subtle. Plenty of examples are given in this and that species,
ending with the prediction that all the same will eventually
be found in Man. That actually happened a few years after this
1986 book circulated. There is a pretty good chapter on human
sleep/wake timing, too, some comments on jet-lag that should
help dispel rampant superstition on that subject, and some
chapters on biochemical and chemical oscillators. None of it is outdated: it seems to be the last
word on these topics. But a big thing is missing. Nothing is
found here about the molecular genetics of the circadian clock.
That is because all that was discovered in the 1990s. For a timely
update 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 the
principles of phase resetting are finally made clear, as done
nowhere else, in three-dimensional brilliant color codes.
|
