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