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In this ambitious book, Eugene V. Koonin illuminates the gamut of randomness and regularity that is at the heart of life. Pointing the way beyond Modern Synthesis, Koonin brings together new data and concepts in an attempt to achieve a far deeper understanding of the interplay between chance and necessity that drives biological evolution. He explains evolution as a stochastic process based on historical contingency, constrained by requirements for maintaining cell organization and modulated by adaptation. To support his argument, he weaves together multiple conceptual threads: genomic comparisons that illuminate ancestral forms; new insights into pattern, process, and contingency in evolution; advances in the study of gene expression, protein abundance, and other phenotypic molecular characteristics; application of statistical physics to the study of the evolution of genes and genomes; and new perspectives on probability now emerging from modern cosmology.
The Logic of Chance shows why these insights make the twentieth-century scientific consensus about evolution appear outdated and incomplete and outlines a fundamentally new approach: one that is challenging, sometimes controversial, and always firmly rooted in hard science. Coverage includes
- Understanding the forces and patterns of evolution
- Surprising evolutionary reconstructions arising from the comparison of complete genomes
- Is there a tree of life – or a forest?
- How complex eukaryotes arose: tantalizing hints about one of evolutionary biology's key enigmas
- Biological complexity and entropy: evolutionary lessons from Kolmogorov, Shannon, and Boltzmann
- Robustness, evolvability, and the creative role of noise in evolution
- The Last Universal Common Ancestor, cell origins, and the primordial gene pool
- The key role of viruses and the virus-cell arms race in evolution
- Life's origin: estimating the probability of "unique events" in the context of modern cosmology
Preface: Toward a postmodern synthesis of evolutionary biology viiChapter 1: The fundamentals of evolution: Darwin and Modern Synthesis 1Chapter 2: From Modern Synthesis to evolutionary genomics: Multiple processes and patterns of evolution 21Chapter 3: Comparative genomics: Evolving genomescapes 49Chapter 4: Genomics, systems biology, and universals of evolution: Genome evolution as a phenomenon of statistical physics 81Chapter 5: The web genomics of the prokaryotic world: Vertical and horizontal flows of genes, the mobilome, and the dynamic pangenomes 105Chapter 6: The phylogenetic forest and the quest for the elusive Tree of Life in the age of genomics 145Chapter 7: The origins of eukaryotes: Endosymbiosis, the strange story of introns, and the ultimate importance of unique events in evolution 171Chapter 8: The non-adaptive null hypothesis of genome evolution and origins of biological complexity 225Chapter 9: The Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Wrightean modalities of evolution, robustness, evolvability, and the creative role of noise in evolution 257Chapter 10: The Virus World and its evolution 293Chapter 11: The Last Universal Common Ancestor, the origin of cells, and the primordial gene pool 329Chapter 12: Origin of life: The emergence of translation, replication, metabolism, and membranes--the biological, geochemical, and cosmological perspectives 351Chapter 13: The postmodern state of evolutionary biology 397Appendix A: Postmodernist philosophy, metanarratives, and the nature and goals of the scientific endeavor 421Appendix B: Evolution of the cosmos and life: Eternal inflation, "many worlds in one," anthropic selection, and a rough estimate of the probability of the origin of life 431References 439Endnotes 479Acknowledgments 495About the author 497Index 499
Eugene V. Koonin is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health), as well as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biology Direct. Dr. Koonin's group performs research in many areas of evolutionary genomics, with a special emphasis on whole-genome approaches to the study of major transitions in life's evolution, such as the origin of eukaryotes, the evolution of eukaryotic gene structure, the origin and evolution of different classes of viruses, and evolutionary systems biology. 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 York: Springer).
"Koonin's account of viral and pre-eukaryotic evolution is undoubtedly up-to-date. His "mega views" of evolution (given what was said above) and his cosmological musings, on the other hand, are interesting reading."
– Summing Up: Recommended, Choice
