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The logic of chance : the nature and origin of biological evolution / Eugene V. Koonin.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Koonin, Eugene V.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Evolutionary genetics.
- Genomes.
- Evolution (Biology).
- Physical Description:
- xii, 516 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Pearson Education, [2012]
- Summary:
- In this ambitious book, Eugene V. Koonin illuminates the gamut of randomness and regularity that is at the heart of life, Pointing the way beyond Modern Synthesis, Koonin brings together new data and concepts in an attempt to a achieve a far of the interplay between chance and necessity that drives biological evolution. He explains evolution as a stochastic process based on historical contingency, constrained by requirements for maintaining cell organization and modulated by adaptation. To support his argument, he weaves together multiple conceptual threads: genomic comparisons that illuminate ancestral forms; new insights into pattern, process, and Contingency in evolution; advances in the study of gene expression, protein abundance, and other phenotypic molecular characteristics application of statistical physics to the study of the evolution of genes and genomes; and new perspectives on probability now emerging from modern cosmology.
- The Logic of Chance shows why these insights make the twentieth-century scientific consensus about evolution appear outdated and incomplete and outlines a fundamentally new approach one that is challenging, sometimes controversial, and always firmly rooted in hard science. Coverage includes
- Understanding the forces and patterns of evolution
- Surprising evolutionary reconstructions arising from the comparison of complete genomes
- Is there a tree of life or a forest?
- How complex eukaryotes arose: tantalizing hints about one of evolutionary biology's key enigmas
- Biological complexity and entropy: evolutionary lessons from Kolmogorov, Shannon and Boltzmann
- Robustness, evolvability, and the creative role of noise in evolution
- The Last Universal Common Ancestor, cell origins, and the primordial gene pool.
- The key role of viruses and the virus-cell arms race in evolution
- Life's origin: estimating the probability of "unique events" in the context of modern cosmology Book jacket.
- Contents:
- Toward a postmodern synthesis of evolutionary biology
- The fundamentals of evolution : Darwin and modern synthesis
- From modern synthesis to evolutionary genomics : multiple processes and patterns of evolution
- Comparative genomics : evolving genomescapes
- Genomics, systems biology, and universals of evolution : genome evolution as a phenomenon of statistical physics
- The web genomics of the prokaryotic world : vertical and horizontal flows of genes, the mobilome, and the dynamic pangenomes
- The phylogenetic forest and the quest for the elusive Tree of Life in the age of genomics
- The origins of eukaryotes : endosymbiosis, the strange story of introns, and the ultimate importance of unique events in evolution
- The non-adaptive null hypothesis of genome evolution and origins of biological complexity
- The Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Wrightean modalities of evolution, robustness, evolvability, and the creative role of noise in evolution
- The virus world and its evolution
- The last universal common ancestor, the origin of cells, and the primordial gene pool
- Origin of life : the emergence of translation, replication, metabolism, and membranes
- the biological, geochemical, and cosmological perspectives
- The postmodern state of evolutionary biology
- Appendix A. Postmodernist philosophy, metanarratives, and the nature and goals of the scientific endeavor
- Appendix B. Evolution of the cosmos and life : eternal inflation, "many worlds in one," anthropic selection, and a rough estimate of the probability of the origin of life.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Local Notes:
- Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rebecca Pepper Sinkler Fund.
- ISBN:
- 0132542498
- 9780132542494
- OCLC:
- 711043216
- Publisher Number:
- 99946472341
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