James P. Crutchfield, Peter Schuster, eds.
Evolutionary Dynamics: exploring the interplay of selection, accident, neutrality, and function.
OUP. 2003
Today evolution is analyzed at very different levels,
from paleontology to molecular biology and even computer science;
from the commercial use of evolutionary drug design
to the innovation of new and highly abstract mathematics.
Nonetheless, common phenomena and common problems relate evolutionary behaviors
as they appear in these different arenas.
Examples include stepwise rather than gradual time courses of evolutionary adaptation,
the role of selectively neutral variants in optimization,
the destabilization of evolutionary memory as a function of parameters (error thresholds),
the emergence of novel dynamical behaviors induced by finite populations,
and the lack of a theory for genotype-phenotype relations and for emergent functionality.
New paradigms and metaphors—such as self-organization, complex adaptive systems,
phase transitions, and stochastic dynamical systems—will help
to achieve progress and hopefully a new level of integration in analyzing these difficult problems.
This book presents a wide range of research on these cross-cutting topics.
The workshop out of which they came brought together physicists and computer scientists,
on the one hand, and molecular, developmental, and macro-evolutionary biologists, on the other.
The dialogue that emerges from the
collection as a whole sheds new light on the richness and difficulty of evolutionary dynamics.
Contents
- • Dynamics of Evolutionary Processes. 2003
- • Niles Eldredge. The sloshing bucket: how the physical realm controls evolution. 2003
- • Gunther J. Eble. Developmental morphospaces and evolution. 2003
- • Stefan Bornholdt. The dynamics of large biological systems: a statistical physics view of macroevolution. 2003
- • Aviv Bergman, Marcus W. Feldman. On the population genetics of punctuation. 2003
- • James P. Crutchfield. When evolution is revolution. 2003
- • Sergey Gavrilets. Evolution and speciation in a hyperspace: the roles of neutrality, selection, mutation, and random drift. 2003
- • Peter Schuster. Molecular insights into evolution of phenotypes. 2003
- • Tomoko Ohta. The nearly neutral theory with special reference to interactions at the molecular level. 2003
- • Peter F. Stadler. Spectral landscape theory. 2003
- • Nigel Snoad, Martin Nilsson. Quasispecies evolution on dynamic fitness landscapes. 2003
- • Lionel Barnett. Recombination and bistability in finite populations. 2003
- • Guy Sella, Michael Lachmann. On the dynamic persistence of cooperation: how lower individual fitness induces higher survivability. 2003
- • Kristian Lindgren, Johann Johansson. Coevolution of strategies in n-person Prisoner's Dilemma. 2003
- • James P. Crutchfield, Melanie Mitchell, Rajarshi Das. Evolutionary design of collective computation in cellular automata. 2003