Human Gene Evolution. David N. Cooper. BIOS Scientific Publishers, Oxford. 1999. Pp. 490. Price £75.00, hardback. ISBN 1 859961 51 7.

Abstract

This is a wonderful book, but it made me wonder about books. What are they for nowadays? It would be very straightforward to argue that all the information collected in this book might just as well be put on a website, with the great advantage that updates could be made without posting any paper to anyone. I suspect that the pragmatic answer is that books are still a lot easier to sell, and for this kind of book many people will still prefer a physical book with an index rather than a searchable website. What kind of book is it? Essentially it is a work of reference, but with the facts accompanied by lucid and critical explanation. It is especially timely in providing a comprehensive and scholarly review of the state of knowledge on human gene evolution at the end of the 'pregenomic era'. It distils a huge amount of dispersed primary literature into an accessible reference source, and for me (and probably many others) it will be most valuable as a source of examples of all the rich and strange inhabitants of the genome: overlapping genes, semiprocessed pseudogenes, genes with 4 bp exons, genes with 3' UTRs of - 2 bp, and genes involved in fusion splicing and exon scrambling.