The Logic of Chance The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

The Logic of Chanceoffers 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#xA0; 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;#xA0; 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.

EUGENE V. KOONIN is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health) as well as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biology Direct. Dr. Koonin is the author of more than 600 scientific articles and a previous book, Sequence Evolution Function: Computational Approaches in Comparative Genomics (with Michael Galperin [2002] New Yori: Springer).