Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Riflessioni sulla biologia moderna

Invito alla lettura della review di M. Ruse...attenzione, il contenuto del saggio è ancora provvisorio!

Ecco il saggio:The new biology: beyond the Modern Synthesis
Michael R Rose, Todd H Oakley
Biology Direct 2007, 2:30
Dal sito della rivista riporto:
Background: The last third of the 20th Century featured an accumulation of researchfindings that severely challenged the assumptions of the “Modern Synthesis” whichprovided the foundations for most biological research during that century. Thefoundations of that “Modernist” biology had thus largely crumbled by the start of the 21stCentury. This in turn raises the question of foundations for biology in the 21st Century.Conclusions: Like the physical sciences in the first half of the 20th Century, biology atthe start of the 21st Century is achieving a substantive maturity of theory, experimentaltools, and fundamental findings thanks to relatively secure foundations in genomics.Genomics has also forced biologists to connect evolutionary and molecular biology,because these formerly Balkanized disciplines have been brought together as actors onthe genomic stage. Biologists are now addressing the evolution of genetic systems usingmore than the concepts of population biology alone, and the problems of cell biologyusing more than the tools of biochemistry and molecular biology alone. It is becomingincreasingly clear that solutions to such basic problems as aging, sex, development, andgenome size potentially involve elements of biological science at every level oforganization, from molecule to population. The new biology knits together genomics,bioinformatics, evolutionary genetics, and other such general-purpose tools to supplynovel explanations for the paradoxes that undermined Modernist

.....sulla stessa rivista segnalo anche questi saggi:
Hypothesis
The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution
Eugene V Koonin
Biology Direct 2007, 2:21 (20 August 2007)
Hypothesis
On the origin of the translation system and the genetic code in the RNA world by means of natural selection, exaptation, and subfunctionalization
Yuri I Wolf, Eugene V Koonin
Biology Direct 2007, 2:14 (31 May 2007)

Paolo Coccia

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