Weiss Kenneth M., Buchanan Anne. Genetics and the logic of evolution

New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken. 2004. p — 538.Our aim in this book is to develop some general principles to help describe the patterns to be found in the seemingly disparate facts about the diversity of life on Earth.It is an effort to assemble and digest observations made by naturalists and biologists from Aristotle to scientists publishing today — of organisms that live at temperatures above the boiling point of water and others that live in ice, organisms that fly and others that swim, those that inhale oxygen and those that expel it; how they are different and what they share. How can evolution, the single phenomenon that we invoke to explain how this endless diversity arose from one beginning, have produced it all?Modern biological theory is thoroughly gene-centered, and this book is no exception.Genes are considered the essential storehouses of biological information and the mechanism through which evolution works. Thus, our specific interest in this book is in explaining the role of nucleic acids — DNA and RNA — in the evolution of complex organisms. At the same time, there is a danger in attributing too much to one cause, genetic or otherwise, or to one evolutionary process, or in considering the issues in such a detailed and itemized way that the broader picture gets lost. In this book, we explore how an overly gene-based approach to biology can constrain our understanding of evolution.Much of what we write about necessarily assumes evolution as its basic framework, that is, that organisms today have descended from ancestral organisms. But much of what we present considers alternative or supplemental general principles that we think are about as fundamental and ubiquitous in life as the core principles originally articulated by Darwin and Wallace. The theory of evolution was formalized as population genetics almost a century ago, but population genetics has little to say about the actual traits in organisms, how they are made, and how they evolve.Natural selection is at the heart of classical theory, but there is more going on than that, and we try to show what it is and where it might apply. Biology is forced to guess at the particulars of the evolution of traits and organisms because of millions of years of unobserved history that lies behind them. Natural selection is a rather generic explanation, which does not provide a very satisfying account of the particulars of the high degree of complexity found in organisms or even in cells themselves. To look at these, we consider aspects of life such as development, sensory systems, reproduction, and even perception. They illustrate some general principles that provide a remarkably consistent picture of processes involved in very disparate traits across the spectrum of life.