Description
By focusing on the cellular mechanisms that underlie ontogeny, phylogeny and regeneration of complex physiologic traits, Evolution, the Logic of Biology demonstrates the use of homeostasis, the fundamental principle of physiology and medicine, as the unifying mechanism for evolution as all of biology. The homeostasis principle can be used to understand how environmental stressors have affected physiologic mechanisms to generate condition-specific novelty through cellular mechanisms.
Evolution, the Logic of Biology allows the reader to understand the vertebrate life-cycle as an intergenerational continuum in support of effective, on-going environmental adaptation. By understanding the principles of physiology from their fundamental unicellular origins, culminating in modern-day metazoans, the reader as student, researcher or practitioner will be encouraged to think in terms of the prevention of disease, rather than in the treatment of disease as the eradication of symptoms.
By tracing the ontogeny and phylogeny of this and other phenotypic homologies, one can perceive and understand how complex physiologic traits have mechanistically evolved from their simpler ancestral and developmental origins as cellular structures and functions, providing a logic of biology for the first time.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1 Introduction 1
2 On the Fractal Nature of Evolution 13
3 The Historic Perspective on Paracrinology and Evolution as Lead‐ins to a Systems Biology Approach 23
4 Evolution of Adipocyte Differentiation Related Protein, or “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” – Theodore Geissel, Aka Dr Seuss 37
5 Evolutionary Ontology and Epistemology 49
6 Calcium‐Lipid Epistasis: Like Ouroboros, the Snake, Catching its Tail! 65
7 The Lung Alveolar Lipofibroblast: An Evolutionary Strategy Against Neonatal Hyperoxic Lung Injury 77
8 Bio‐Logic 85
9 Cell Signaling as the Basis for all of Biology 107
10 Information + Negentropy + Homeostasis = Evolution 119
11 Vertical Integration of Cytoskeletal Function from Yeast to Human 125
12 Yet Another Bite of the “Evolutionary” Apple 135
13 On Eliminating the Subjectivity from Biology: Predictions 165
14 The Predictive Value of the Cellular Approach to Evolution 173
15 Homeostasis as the Mechanism of Evolution 189
16 On the Evolution of Development 201
17 A Central Theory of Biology 219
18 Implications of Evolutionary Physiology for Astrobiology 231
19 Pleiotropy Reveals the Mechanism of Evolutionary Novelty 257
20 Meta‐Darwinism 267
Index 279
