Acknowledgments.

I. UNDERSTANDING BIOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY: Basic Concepts and Principles.

1. Prospect: The Basic Postulates of Life.

2. Conceptual and Analytic Approaches to Evolution.

3. Evolution By Phenotype: How Change Happens in Life.

II. BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE: A Genetic Repertoire for Evolving Complexity.

4. The Storage and Flow of Biological Information.

5. Genotypes and Phenotypes.

6. A Cell is Born.

7. A Repertoire of Basic Genetic Mechanisms.

III. AN INTERNAL AWARENESS OF SELF: Communication within Organisms.

8. Making More of Life: The Many Aspects of Reproduction.

9. Scaling Up: How Cells Build an Organism.

10. Communicating Between Cells.

11. Detecting and Destroying Internal Invaders.

IV. EXTERNAL AWARENESS: Information Transfer between Environment to Organism.

12. Detecting Physical Variability in the Environment.

13. Chemical Signaling and Sensation from the Outside World.

14. Detecting Light.

15. The Development and Structure of Nervous Systems.

16. Perceiving: Integrating Signals from the Environment.

V. FINALE: Evolutionary Order and Disorder between Phenotypes and Genotypes.

17. A Great Chain of Beings.

References.

Index.