The Serengeti Rules by Sean B Carroll review – a visionary book about how life works

Carroll argues that life, from genes to ecosystems, is regulated top-down by predators - a powerful idea that can help us devise cures for disease and regenerate natural habitats

As diagnosed by Thomas Kuhn in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), science proceeds by way of a rare shaking of the pieces into a new coherent explanatory pattern followed by a descent into increasing complexity before the next moment of clarity emerges. Watson and Crick's DNA structure of 1953 and the genetic code of 1968 were almost indecently clear and simple for a biology that often seems to consist only of exceptions to any rule you care to formulate. It is now 15 years since the human genome sequence was announced, to huge fanfare, but the simple hopes of that time for an immediate avalanche of universal medical benefits have not yet been realised. Anyone reading the latest papers on genomics in the magazines Science and Nature must be chastened by the byzantine complexity of gene interactions being teased out by the researchers.

But help is at hand. Sean Carroll is both a distinguished scientist - one of the founders of evolutionary development biology (evo-devo, to give it its jazzier name) - and one of our great science writers. His Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2005) is one of the essential books of our time, explaining for a general audience how the shapes of organisms are produced by genes.