V. Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An EarthWinian Genesis Synthesis

Witting, Lars. Inevitable Evolution: Back to The Origin and Beyond the 20th Century Paradigm of Contingent Evolution by Historical Natural Selection. Biological Reviews. 83/3, 2008. Please see a review in The Thermodynamics of Life section.

Witting, Lars. Major Life-History Transitions by Deterministic Directional Natural Selection. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 225/3, 2003. Selection is not seen to act randomly but in an evolutionary direction determined by an increase in the energetic state of an organism and density-dependent competitive interactions. What results is a tree of life with both a major axial trunk and offshoots of diversity.

Woese, Carl. A New Biology for a New Century. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. 68/2, 2004. Noted more in Systems Biology, the sage paper contends that much more is going on to drive and direct evolution than aimless selection.

Biologists now need to reformulate their view of evolution to study it in complex dynamic-systems terms. (180) Translationally produced proteins, multicellular organisms, and social structures are each the result of, emerge from, fields of interaction when the latter attain a certain degree of complexity and specificity. (180)

Woese, Carl and Nigel Goldenfeld. How the Microbial World Saved Evolution from the Scylla of Molecular Biology and the Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. 73/1, 2009. The University of Illinois renowned biologist and interdisciplinary physicist are contributing a series of luminous articles (search both), at once trying to wholly right and reorient the study of emergent life, along with what kind of much more vital universe is so implied in support. A crucial aspect of this project is a need to unburden evolutionary studies from their vested mechanical paradigm, which for most of the 20th century has led it on the wrong course. A 21st century turn to an intrinsic dynamical systems biology begs such a revolution for life to properly, finally understand itself.

In this Newtonian world, the study of biology becomes a highly derived subdiscipline of the basic science of physics—in effect, an engineering enterprise; there is nothing “fundamental” about it. Biology becomes a study of machines made of assemblages of parts and the interactions among them, an exercise in describing, but not explaining, things as they are. However, it is intuitively obvious that the essence of biology lies not in things as they are, but in things coming into existence. Biology is a study, not in being, but in becoming. For us, the fascination of the subject derives from the astounding fact that life exists at all and has developed such remarkable complexity. A discipline whose perspective is that of classical 19th century physics is inherently incapable of dealings with the problems of a nonlinear world, which is nonreductionist, nondeterministic (acausal), and works in terms of fields and emergent properties, not a static world of particles with linear relationships among them. (17)

It can no longer afford to keep the study of evolution within the narrow confines of the so-called modern evolutionary synthesis. If 21st century biology is to remain a basic discipline, it must focus on the nature of biological organization, which means biology must now be put on an evolutionary base. Biological organization will never be understood except as the expression of an underlying evolutionary process. As biology becomes a science in the true meaning of the word, it must become self-conscious of the structure of the only theoretical foundation that can unify our understanding of it: the evolutionary process. Only in this way will biology ever become more than a disconnected collection of facts. (20)

Wolf, Yuri, et al. Scale-Free Networks in Biology: New Insights into the Fundamentals of Evolution? BioEssays. 24/2, 2002. After all the discrete components - genes, cells, organisms, etc - are identified, the presence of dynamic interrelations that join them can now be recognized. The same self-organizing, small world, power law system is then found at each phase from biomolecules to lexicons.

Several recent studies examine promising mathematical formalisms for describing the properties of biological networks, which seem to belong to the extremely general class of so-called scale-free networks, which are discernible not only in biological, but also in physical and social phenomena. (105) During the evolution from the proto-cell to modern organisms, the main trend was incremental increase of complexity. Thus, it is not surprising that many biological systems, including neural networks, metabolic pathways, protein domain networks, appear to conform with the scale-free network model…..Such connections keep alive the hope that there are some universal laws of mathematical harmony behind the living and inanimate Nature. (106)

Zeigler, David. A Question of Purpose. Evolution: Education and Outreach. 1/1, 2010. A new journal to defend, support and foster a public understanding of life’s evolution and its teaching in high school and college. Edited by the American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Niles Eldredge and biology teacher Gregory Eldredge, its Editorial Board includes Douglas Futuyma, Eugenie Scott and Ian Tattersall. But this article in the inaugural issue represents the deep, unrecognized crux of people’s problem with evolutionary science, which amazingly no one seems to realize.
The writer, a University of North Carolina at Pembroke biology professor, marshals voices from Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare (a tale told by an idiot), to Stephen Weinberg (it’s so pointless), and of course Stephen Jay Gould, to denounce any idea or hope of an “evolutionary progressionism.” The current champion is Richard Dawkins who uses pen and podium to mock any intrinsic source or axial direction, The Greatest Show on Earth is a no show.
Cannot anyone see that such a Darwinian fundamentalism categorically denying any greater creation, which Charles himself would reject, is quite apart from the field, fossil, and laboratory textbook science itself. Life’s sequential procession over a billion years, via a billion, dovetailing pieces of evidence, from molecular origins to intelligent mammals surely has surely occurred, as we conversant primates now reflect upon. But to then, wholly separate from the evidence, lay upon the public, as if an evolutionary extremism, often from atheist agendas, that it is all blindly and dumbly for naught is quite another unwarranted inference.

This journal promotes accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience. Evolution: Education and Outreach addresses the question of why we should care about evolution by exploring the practical applications of evolutionary principles in daily life and the impact of evolutionary theory on culture and society throughout history. Targeting K-16 students, teachers and scientists alike, the journal presents articles to aid members of these communities in the teaching of evolutionary theory. It connects teachers with scientists by adapting cutting-edge, peer reviewed articles for classroom use on varied instructional levels. (Journal website)

Zelditch, Miriam and Anjali Goswami. What Does Modularity Mean? Evolution and Development. August, 2021. We recall when Gunter Wagner’s 1996 paper was an initial notice of nature’s avail of diverse modules as a good way to form and bolster bodies and brains. Twenty five years later, University of Michigan and Natural History Museum, London paleontologists finesse and confirm its ubiquitous use and value. However then might it dawn that these now worldwide surveys have come upon a greater phenomenal genesis which in place on its preordained own?

Modularity is now recognized as a fundamental feature of organisms, with profound consequences for evolution. This natural propensity has become a major focus of research in organismal biology across disciplines including genetics, developmental biology, functional morphology, population and evolutionary biology. But the concept of modularity retains an ambiguity due to diverse definitions about what it means, Here we review various concepts, metrics and methods at different levels, and some other concerns. (Abstract excerpt)

Zhang, Feng, et al. The Potential and Flux Landscape Theory of Evolution. Journal of Chemical Physics. 137/065102, 2012. East is east and west is west, as Kipling famously wrote, but today these hemispheres do meet, but still hold to polar views, in this case about evolutionary theory. Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Jilin University, and SUNY Stony Brook researchers seek to integrate the presence of holistic nonlinear self-organization as an innate formative agency. Typical section headings are Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics, Intrinsic Energy, Entropy, and Free Energy of General Dynamical Systems, and Underlying Potential-Flux Landscapes for the General Evolutionary Dynamics. This prior source, which joins life’s emergence with a fertile nature, as if a genotype for Metazoan phenotypes, is ignored, not considered or even permitted in western approaches. The Abstract concludes “Our work provides a theoretical foundation for evolutionary dynamics.”

We established the potential and flux landscape theory for evolution. We found explicitly the conventional Wright's gradient adaptive landscape based on the mean fitness is inadequate to describe the general evolutionary dynamics. We show the intrinsic potential as being Lyapunov function does exist and can define the adaptive landscape for general evolution dynamics for studying global stability. The driving force determining the dynamics can be decomposed into gradient of potential landscape and curl probability flux. Non-zero flux causes detailed balance breaking and measures how far the evolution from equilibrium state. The gradient of intrinsic potential and curl flux are perpendicular to each other in zero fluctuation limit resembling electric and magnetic forces on electrons. We quantified intrinsic energy, entropy and free energy of evolution and constructed non-equilibrium thermodynamics. (Abstract)

We developed non-equilibrium thermodynamics to characterize the global properties of the evolution system. Based on that we construct the underlying energy, entropy, and free energy. We can see the system entropy may not always increase. We found the intrinsic non-equilibrium free energy defined here always monotomically decreases in time for the evolutionary dynamics. By exploring the non-equilibrium free energy in time and steady state, we analyzed the global stability of the evolution and associated phases as well as the phase transitions in between. (065102-2)

[Prev Pages]   Previous   | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29