Overview

"The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative genomics and systems biology. The author presents many specific examples from systems and comparative genomic analysis to begin to build a new, much more detailed, complex, and realistic picture of evolution. The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including  the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution; the key role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution and the consequent overhaul of the Tree of Life concept;  the central, underappreciated evolutionary importance of viruses; the origin of eukaryotes as a result of endosymbiosis; the concomitant origin of cells and viruses on the primordial earth; universal dependences between genomic and molecular-phenomic variables; and the evolving landscape of constraints that shape the evolution of genomes and molecular phenomes.   ""Koonin's account of viral and pre-eukaryotic evolution is undoubtedly up-to-date. His ""mega views"" of evolution (given what was said above) and his cosmological musings, on the other hand, are interesting reading."" Summing Up: Recommended Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.  "

Full Product Details

Author:   Eugene V. Koonin
Publisher:   Pearson Education (US)
Imprint:   Financial TImes Prentice Hall
Dimensions:   Width: 23.20cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 16.30cm
Weight:   0.822kg
ISBN:  

9780132542494

ISBN 10:   0132542498
Pages:   528
Publication Date:   29 September 2011
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   In Print  
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

Table of Contents

Preface: Toward a postmodern synthesis of evolutionary biology     vii Chapter 1: The fundamentals of evolution: Darwin and Modern Synthesis     1 Chapter 2: From Modern Synthesis to evolutionary genomics: Multiple processes and patterns of evolution     21 Chapter 3: Comparative genomics: Evolving genomescapes     49 Chapter 4: Genomics, systems biology, and universals of evolution: Genome evolution as a phenomenon of statistical physics     81 Chapter 5: The web genomics of the prokaryotic world: Vertical and horizontal flows of genes, the mobilome, and the dynamic pangenomes     105 Chapter 6: The phylogenetic forest and the quest for the elusive Tree of Life in the age of genomics     145 Chapter 7: The origins of eukaryotes: Endosymbiosis, the strange story of introns, and the ultimate importance of unique events in evolution     171 Chapter 8: The non-adaptive null hypothesis of genome evolution and origins of biological complexity     225 Chapter 9: The Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Wrightean modalities of evolution, robustness, evolvability, and the creative role of noise in evolution     257 Chapter 10: The Virus World and its evolution     293 Chapter 11: The Last Universal Common Ancestor, the origin of cells, and the primordial gene pool     329 Chapter 12: Origin of life: The emergence of translation, replication, metabolism, and membranes--the biological, geochemical, and cosmological perspectives     351 Chapter 13: The postmodern state of evolutionary biology     397 Appendix A: Postmodernist philosophy, metanarratives, and the nature and goals of the scientific endeavor     421 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     431 References     439 Endnotes     479 Acknowledgments     495 About the author     497 Index     499

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Author Information

Eugene V. Koonin is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health), as well as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biology Direct. Dr. Koonin’s group performs research in many areas of evolutionary genomics, with a special emphasis on whole-genome approaches to the study of major transitions in life’s evolution, such as the origin of eukaryotes, the evolution of eukaryotic gene structure, the origin and evolution of different classes of viruses, and evolutionary systems biology. Dr. Koonin is the author of more than 600 scientific articles and a previous book Sequence--Evolution--Function: Computational Approaches in Comparative Genomics (with Michael Galperin [2002] New York: Springer).

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