Since 1997, scientists of different disciplines sharing a deep interest in concepts and knowledge related to evolutionary biology have held the annual Evolutionary Biology Meetings in Marseille in order to discuss their research and promote collaboration. Lately scientists especially focusing on applications have also joined the group.
Evolutionary Biology: Concept, Modeling and Application starts with the report of the 12th Evolutionary Biology Meeting, which gives a general idea of the meeting's epistemological stance. This is followed by 22 chapters, a selection of the most representative contributions, which are grouped under the following four themes:
Part I – Concepts and Knowledge
Part II – Modelization
Part III – Applied Evolutionary Biology
and, Part IV – Applications in Other Fields
Part IV transcends the field of biology, presenting applications of evolutionary biology in economics and astronomy.
Part I Concepts and Knowledge
1 Spontaneous generation revisited at the molecular level - Fabiana Ciciriello, Giovanna Costanzo, Samanta Pino, Ernesto Di Mauro
2 Minimal Cell Model to Understand Origin of Life and Evolution - Tadashi Sugawara
3 New fossils and new hope for the origin of angiosperms - Xin Wang
4 Vertebrate evolution: the strange case of gymnophionan amphibians - Jean-Marie Exbrayat and Michel Raquet
5 The evolution of morphogenetic signalling in the social amoebas - Yoshinori Kawabe, Elisa Alvarez-Curto, Allyson V. Ritchie and Pauline Schaap
6 On the surprising weakness of pancreatic beta-cell antioxidant defences: an evolutionary persective - Armin Rashidi, Thomas B L Kirkwood and Daryl P Shanley
7 The importance of transpositions and recombination to genome instability according hobo-element distribution pattern in completely sequence genome of Drosophila melanogaster - L. P. Zakharenko, M. P. Perepelkina and D. A. Afonnikov
8 Long-term evolution of histone families: old notions and new insights into their mechanisms of diversification across eukaryotes - José M. Eirín-López, Rodrigo González-Romero, Deanna Dryhurst, Josefina Méndez and Juan Ausió
9 Masculinization Events and Doubly Uniparental Inheritance of Mitochondrial DNA: A Model for Understanding the Evolutionary Dynamics of Gender-asssociated mtDNA in Mussels - Donald T. Stewart, Sophie Breton, Pierre U. Blier, and Walter R. Hoeh
10 Missing the Sub-Cellular Target: A Mechanism of Eukaryotic Gene Evolution - S. A. Byun McKay, R. Geeta, R. Duggan, B. Carroll, and S. J. McKay
11 The evolution of functional gene clusters 1 in eukaryote genomes - Takashi Makino and Aoife McLysagh
12 Knowledge standardization in evolutionary biology: the Comparative Data Analysis Ontology (CDAO) - Francisco Prosdocimi, Brandon Chisham, Enrico Pontelli, Arlin Stoltzfus and Julie D. Thompson
Part II Modeling
13 Large scale analyses of positive selection using codon models - Romain A. Studer and Marc Robinson-Rechavi
14 Molecular Coevolution and the Three-dimensionality of Natural Selection - Mario A. Fares and Christina Toft
15 The Evolutionary Constraints in Mutational Replacements 0 Branko Borštnik, Borut Oblak and Danilo Pumpernik
16 Why Phylogenetic Trees are Often Quite Robust Against Lateral Transfers - Marc Thuillard
Part III Applied Evolutionary Biology
17 The genome sequence of Meloidogyne incognita unveils mechanisms of adaptation to pant-parasitism in Metazoa - Etienne G.J. Danchin and Laetitia Perfus-Barbeoch
18 Ecological Genomics of Nematode Community Interactions: Model and Non-model Approaches - Michael A. Herman, Joseph D. Coolon, Kenneth L. Jones and Timothy Todd
19 Comparative evolutionary histories of fungal chitinases - Magnus Karlsson and Jan Stenlid
20 Aging -- Evolutionary Theory meets Genomic Approaches - George L. Sutphin and Brian K. Kennedy
Part IV Applications in Other Fields
21 Galaxies and cladistics - Didier Fraix-Burnet
22 Economics pursuing the mold of evolutionary biology: "Accidents" and "Neccesity" in the quest to make economics scientific - Michael Turk