Biology's First Law PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Biology's First Law PDF full book. Access full book title Biology's First Law by Daniel W. McShea. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Daniel W. McShea
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226562271
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Get Book Here
Book Description
Life on earth is characterized by three striking phenomena that demand explanation: adaptation—the marvelous fit between organism and environment; diversity—the great variety of organisms; and complexity—the enormous intricacy of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity? Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon argue that there exists in evolution a spontaneous tendency toward increased diversity and complexity, one that acts whether natural selection is present or not. They call this tendency a biological law—the Zero-Force Evolutionary Law, or ZFEL. This law unifies the principles and data of biology under a single framework and invites a reconceptualization of the field of the same sort that Newton’s First Law brought to physics. Biology’s First Law shows how the ZFEL can be applied to the study of diversity and complexity and examines its wider implications for biology. Intended for evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and other scientists studying complex systems, and written in a concise and engaging format that speaks to students and interdisciplinary practitioners alike, this book will also find an appreciative audience in the philosophy of science.
Author: Daniel W. McShea
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226562271
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Get Book Here
Book Description
Life on earth is characterized by three striking phenomena that demand explanation: adaptation—the marvelous fit between organism and environment; diversity—the great variety of organisms; and complexity—the enormous intricacy of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity? Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon argue that there exists in evolution a spontaneous tendency toward increased diversity and complexity, one that acts whether natural selection is present or not. They call this tendency a biological law—the Zero-Force Evolutionary Law, or ZFEL. This law unifies the principles and data of biology under a single framework and invites a reconceptualization of the field of the same sort that Newton’s First Law brought to physics. Biology’s First Law shows how the ZFEL can be applied to the study of diversity and complexity and examines its wider implications for biology. Intended for evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and other scientists studying complex systems, and written in a concise and engaging format that speaks to students and interdisciplinary practitioners alike, this book will also find an appreciative audience in the philosophy of science.
Author: G. Vijver
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401715106
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 442
Get Book Here
Book Description
The three well known revolutions of the past centuries - the Copernican, the Darwinian and the Freudian - each in their own way had a deflating and mechanizing effect on the position of humans in nature. They opened up a richness of disillusion: earth acquired a more modest place in the universe, the human body and mind became products of a long material evolutionary history, and human reason, instead of being the central, immaterial, locus of understanding, was admitted into the theater of discourse only as a materialized and frequently out-of-control actor. Is there something objectionable to this picture? Formulated as such, probably not. Why should we resist the idea that we are in certain ways, and to some degree, physically, biologically or psychically determined? Why refuse to acknowledge the fact that we are materially situated in an ever evolving world? Why deny that the ways of inscription (traces of past events and processes) are co-determinative of further "evolutionary pathways"? Why minimize the idea that each intervention, of each natural being, is temporally and materially situated, and has, as such, the inevitable consequence of changing the world? The point is, however, that there are many, more or less radically different, ways to consider the "mechanization" of man and nature. There are, in particular, many ways to get the message of "material and evolutionary determination", as well as many levels at which this determination can be thought of as relevant or irrelevant.
Author: James Alan Shapiro
Publisher: Pearson Education
ISBN: 0132780933
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book proposes an important new paradigm for understanding biological evolution. Shapiro demonstrates why traditional views of evolution are inadequate to explain the latest evidence, and presents an alternative. His information- and systems-based approach integrates advances in symbiogenesis, epigenetics, and saltationism, and points toward an emerging synthesis of physical, information, and biological sciences.
Author: Dmitri Koroliouk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1786309114
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book illustrates a number of asymptotic and analytic approaches applied for the study of random evolutionary systems, and considers typical problems for specific examples. In this case, constructive mathematical models of natural processes are used, which more realistically describe the trajectories of diffusion-type processes, rather than those of the Wiener process. We examine models where particles have some free distance between two consecutive collisions. At the same time, we investigate two cases: the Markov evolutionary system, where the time during which the particle moves towards some direction is distributed exponentially with intensity parameter λ; and the semi-Markov evolutionary system, with arbitrary distribution of the switching process. Thus, the models investigated here describe the motion of particles with a finite speed and the proposed random evolutionary process with characteristics of a natural physical process: free run and finite propagation speed. In the proposed models, the number of possible directions of evolution can be finite or infinite.
Author: Dmitri Koroliouk
Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
ISBN: 9781786307521
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Within the field of modeling complex objects in natural sciences, which considers systems that consist of a large number of interacting parts, a good tool for analyzing and fitting models is the theory of random evolutionary systems, considering their asymptotic properties and large deviations. In Random Evolutionary Systems we consider these systems in terms of the operators that appear in the schemes of their diffusion and the Poisson approximation. Such an approach allows us to obtain a number of limit theorems and asymptotic expansions of processes that model complex stochastic systems, both those that are autonomous and those dependent on an external random environment. In this case, various possibilities of scaling processes and their time parameters are used to obtain different limit results.
Author: Orkun S. Soyer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461435676
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 459
Get Book Here
Book Description
The book aims to introduce the reader to the emerging field of Evolutionary Systems Biology, which approaches classical systems biology questions within an evolutionary framework. An evolutionary approach might allow understanding the significance of observed diversity, uncover “evolutionary design principles” and extend predictions made in model organisms to others. In addition, evolutionary systems biology can generate new insights into the adaptive landscape by combining molecular systems biology models and evolutionary simulations. This insight can enable the development of more detailed mechanistic evolutionary hypotheses.
Author: Stuart A. Kauffman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199826676
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 958
Get Book Here
Book Description
Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order that is widely observed throughout nature Kauffman argues that self-organization plays an important role in the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt are poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biological science itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences.
Author: Samantha Fowler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781739015503
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Black & white print. Concepts of Biology is designed for the typical introductory biology course for nonmajors, covering standard scope and sequence requirements. The text includes interesting applications and conveys the major themes of biology, with content that is meaningful and easy to understand. The book is designed to demonstrate biology concepts and to promote scientific literacy.
Author: Mitsuo Gen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3540959785
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Get Book Here
Book Description
Artificial evolutionary systems are computer systems, inspired by ideas from natural evolution and related phenomena. The field has a long history, dating back to the earliest days of computer science, but it has only become an established scientific and engineering discipline since the 1990s, with packages for the commonest form, genetic algorithms, now widely available. Researchers in the Asia-Pacific region have participated strongly in the development of evolutionary systems, with a particular emphasis on the evolution of intelligent solutions to highly complex problems. The Asia-Pacific Symposia on Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems have been an important contributor to this growth in impact, since 1997 providing an annual forum for exchange and dissemination of ideas. Participants come primarily from East Asia and the Western Pacific, but contributions are welcomed from around the World. This volume features a selection of fourteen of the best papers from recent APSIES. They illustrate the breadth of research in the region, with applications ranging from business to medicine, from network optimization to the promotion of innovation.
Author: Gisele Ruiz Goldstein
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 9780824709754
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 442
Get Book Here
Book Description
Celebrating the work of renowned mathematician Jerome A. Goldstein, this reference compiles original research on the theory and application of evolution equations to stochastics, physics, engineering, biology, and finance. The text explores a wide range of topics in linear and nonlinear semigroup theory, operator theory, functional analysis, and linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, and studies the latest theoretical developments and uses of evolution equations in a variety of disciplines. Providing nearly 500 references, the book contains discussions by renowned mathematicians such as H. Brezis, G. Da Prato, N.E. Gretskij, I. Lasiecka, Peter Lax, M. M. Rao, and R. Triggiani.
