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Review title: Dense but worthwhile reading
Product review: This book is complementary too, but on a more advanced level than Sean Carroll's From DNA To Diversity, which I strongly recommend as a great intro book to evo-devo. Davidson's book is tough going in places, which is why I gave it one star off, but the material is in fairness quite complex. He emphasizes the role of cis-regulatory sequences in genes and the structure of the systems that regulate gene expression in development and evolution in some detail. It becomes clear how minor mutations in the regulatory part of a gene can transform how it is expressed, and why the importance for evolution in mutations in gene expression is clearly much greater than for mutations in the protein coding sequence. His explanation for what is responsible for the incredible homologies in, for example, the pax 6 gene that regulates eye development across phyla is very illuminating. A must read for anybody interested in the molecular basis for development and evolution.
