Savages

Kidnapped! Louisa entered the storage room and went a couple of feet, stopping in consternation when she didn't see any dresses or packing crates or anything.
The room contained a table and two chairs and a cot with a rope coiled under it against the far wall. On the table were a coffee pot and two cups, as well as a deck of cards.

Since the beginnings of conscious thought, human beings have looked with wonder at the world around them. Perhaps the most significant part of the development of consciousness was self-awareness, and with it came the profoundest of biological questions: “Where did I come from?”.

The Coiled Spring starts with the most fundamental of premises in modern developmental biology: All cells contain the same genetic information. He then logically progresses to ask, if this is so, why all cells in the body are not the same. The rest of the book (and indeed embryogenesis) answers this question.