Evolutionary Bioinformatics

About this book

Now in its third edition and supplemented with more online material, Evolutionary Bioinformatics aims to make the "new" information-based (rather than gene-based) bioinformatics intelligible both to the "bio" people and the "info" people. Books on bioinformatics have traditionally served gene-hunters, and biologists who wish to construct family trees showing tidy lines of descent. While dealing extensively with the exciting topics of gene discovery and database-searching, such books have hardly considered genomes as information channels through which multiple forms and levels of information have passed through the generations. This "new bioinformatics" contrasts with the "old" gene-based bioinformatics that so preoccupies previous texts. Forms of information that we are familiar with (mental, textual) are related to forms with which we are less familiar (hereditary). Evolutionary Bioinformatics extends a line of evolutionary thought that leads from the nineteenth century (Darwin, Butler, Romanes, Bateson), through the twentieth (Goldschmidt, White), and into the twenty first (the final works of the late Stephen Jay Gould). Long an area of controversy, diverging views may now be reconciled.

Contents

Part 1. Information and DNA
1. Memory - A Phenomenon of Arrangement
2. Chargaff's First Parity Rule
3. Information Levels and Barriers

Part 2. Parity and Non-Parity
4. Chargaff's Second Parity Rule
5. Stems and Loops
6. Chargaff's Cluster Rule

Part 3. Variation and Speciation
7. Mutation
8. Species Survival and Arrival
9. The Weak Point
10. Chargaff's GC Rule
11. Homostability

Part 4. Conflict within Genomes
12. Conflict Resolution
13. Exons and Introns
14. Complexity

Part 5. Conflict between Genomes
15. Self/Not-Self?
16. The Crowded Cytosol

Part 6. Sex and Error-Correction
17. Rebooting the Genome
18. The Fifth Letter

Part 7. Information and Mind
19. Memory - What is Arranged and Where?
20.Certainty Now Uncertain

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Biography

Donald Forsdyke graduated from St. Mary's Hospital, London University, UK in 1961. After house appointments at St.Mary's (Medical Unit and Department of Psychiatry) and the Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge (Surgery), he began research in Molecular Biology and Cellular Immunology at the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge (Ph.D. 1967). He was appointed to what was then the Department of Biochemistry at Queen's University in 1968. In 2013 he became President of the John Austin Society for the History of Medicine and Science.