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Lucas J. Mix Joanna Masel 《Evolution; international journal of organic evolution》2014,68(8):2441-2451
Evolutionary biology has a complex relationship with ideas of chance, purpose, and progress. Probability plays a subtle role; strikingly, founding figures in statistics were motivated by evolutionary questions. The findings of evolutionary biology have been used both in support of narratives of progress, and in their deconstruction. Likewise, professional biologists bring to their scientific work a set of preconceptions about chance and progress, grounded in their philosophical, religious, and/or political views. From the religious side, questions of purpose are ever‐present. We explore this interplay in five broad categories: chance, progress, intelligence, eugenics, and the evolution of religious practices, each the subject of a semester long symposium. The intellectual influence of evolutionary biology has had a broad societal impact in these areas. Based on our experience, we draw attention to a number of relevant facts that, while accepted by experts in their respective fields, may be unfamiliar outside them. We list common areas of miscommunication, including specific examples and discussing causes: sometimes semantics and sometimes more substantive knowledge barriers. We also make recommendations for those attempting similar dialogue. 相似文献
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Kurakin A 《Bio Systems》2006,84(1):15-23
Generation of directional movement at the molecular scale is a phenomenon crucial for biological organization and dynamics. It is traditionally described in mechanistic terms, in consistency with the conventional machine-like image of the cell. The designated and highly specialized protein machines and molecular motors are presumed to bring about most of cellular motion. A review of experimental data suggests, however, that uncritical adherence to mechanistic interpretations may limit the ability of researchers to comprehend and model biology. Specifically, this article illustrates that the interpretation of molecular motors and protein translocation in terms of stochasticity and self-organization appears to provide a more adequate and fruitful conceptual framework for understanding of biological organization at the molecular scale. 相似文献
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We show how a dynamical system given by a t-score function for some class of monotonic data transformations generates consistent extreme value estimators. The variation of their values increases the uncertainty of proper assessment of climate change. Two important examples illustrate the methodology: mass balance measurements on Guanaco glacier, Chile, and extreme snow loads in Slovakia. We experience singular learning of the transitions in ecosystems. 相似文献
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Andrew O. M. Wilkie 《Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences》2001,32(4):619-633
The spectre of determinism stalks many of the concerns surrounding the impact of genetic research into both disease and normal behaviour. The ability accurately to predict a person's actions would certainly have profound implications for notions of individuality and free will. But to what extent will the current explosion in genetic research provide more accurate predictors than have been available for millennia in the form of wealth, social status and perceived family resemblance? The genetic research program is at too early a stage to answer this question with confidence, but various indicators tend to point in the same direction: the predictive ability of genetic analysis will generally be low. This conclusion runs counter to widely perceived popular notions. The deconstruction of genetic determinism is an essential safeguard against the real concern that genetic information may be used for discrimination by unscrupulous powers. 相似文献
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Marshall Abrams 《Biology & philosophy》2007,22(1):115-130
Recent debate on the nature of probabilities in evolutionary biology has focused largely on the propensity interpretation
of fitness (PIF), which defines fitness in terms of a conception of probability known as “propensity”. However, proponents
of this conception of fitness have misconceived the role of probability in the constitution of fitness. First, discussions
of probability and fitness have almost always focused on organism effect probability, the probability that an organism and its environment cause effects. I argue that much of the probability relevant to fitness
must be organism circumstance probability, the probability that an organism encounters particular, detailed circumstances within an environment, circumstances which
are not the organism’s effects. Second, I argue in favor of the view that organism effect propensities either don’t exist
or are not part of the basis of fitness, because they usually have values close to 0 or 1. More generally, I try to show that
it is possible to develop a clearer conception of the role of probability in biological processes than earlier discussions
have allowed. 相似文献
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Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) has been commonly used to estimate terrestrial vegetation distribution and productivity. In this study, we adopted recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to investigate the spatial patterns of determinism of the vegetation dynamics ecological-geographical transition zones in North China, especially the differences between transition zone and the surrounding areas. The results indicated that there were obvious regional variances in spatial patterns of RQA indices—determinism, laminarity, entropy, and averaged diagonal line length. Remarkable differences of the determinism of NDVI time series also existed between transition zones and the surrounding areas. Moreover, the correlation analysis between the RQA indices and climatic factors suggested that the determinism of the NDVI time series was nonlinearly affected by hydrothermal conditions. Influenced by vegetation patterns, determinism reached the maximum when the annual precipitation is about 400 mm, which is the lower bound of cultivation and forest distribution, and along the 400 mm isohyet is the area where transition zones locate. 相似文献
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Luisi PL 《化学与生物多样性》2007,4(4):603-621
Synthetic biology as a broad and novel field has also a chemical branch: whereas synthetic biology generally has to do with bioengineering of new forms of life (generally bacteria) which do not exist in nature, 'chemical synthetic biology' is concerned with the synthesis of chemical structures such as proteins, nucleic acids, vesicular forms, and other which do not exist in nature. Three examples of this 'chemical synthetic biology' approach are given in this article. The first example deals with the synthesis of proteins that do not exist in nature, and dubbed as 'the never born proteins' (NBPs). This research is related to the question why and how the protein structures existing in our world have been selected out, with the underlying question whether they have something very particular from the structural or thermodynamic point of view (for example, the folding). The NBPs are produced in the laboratory by the modern molecular biology technique, the phage display, so as to produce a very large library of proteins having no homology with known proteins. The second example of chemical synthetic biology has also to do with the laboratory synthesis of proteins, but, this time, adopting a prebiotic synthetic procedure, the fragment condensation of short peptides, where short means that they have a length that can be obtained by prebiotic methods; for example, from the condensation of N-carboxy anhydrides. The scheme is illustrated and discussed, being based on the fragment condensation catalyzed by peptides endowed with proteolitic activity. Selection during chain growth is determined by solubility under the contingent environmental conditions, i.e., the peptides which result insoluble are eliminated from further growth. The scheme is tested preliminarily with a synthetic chemical fragment-condensation method and brings to the synthesis of a 44-residues-long protein, which has no homology with known proteins, and which has a stable tertiary folding. Finally, the third example, dubbed as 'the minimal cell project'. Here, the aim is to synthesize a cell model having the minimal and sufficient number of components to be defined as living. For this purpose, liposomes are used as shell membranes, and attempts are made to introduce in the interior a minimal genome. Several groups all around the world are active in this field, and significant results have been obtained, which are reviewed in this article. For example, protein expression has been obtained inside liposomes, generally with the green fluorescent protein, GFP. Our last attempts are with a minimal genome consisting of 37 enzymes, a set which is able to express proteins using the ribosomal machinery. These minimal cells are not yet capable of self-reproduction, and this and other shortcomings within the project are critically reviewed. 相似文献
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