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Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems
All living things are remarkably complex, yet their DNA is unstable, undergoing countless random mutations over generations. Despite this instability, most animals do not grow two heads or die, plants continue to thrive, and bacteria continue to divide. Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems tackles this perplexing paradox. The book explores why genetic changes do not cause organisms to fail catastrophically and how evolution shapes organisms' robustness. Andreas Wagner looks at this problem from the ground up, starting with the alphabet of DNA, the genetic code, RNA, and protein molecules, moving on to genetic networks and embryonic development, and working his way up to whole organisms. He then develops an evolutionary explanation for robustness.
Wagner shows how evolution by natural selection preferentially finds and favors robust solutions to the problems organisms face in surviving and reproducing. Such robustness, he argues, also enhances the potential for future evolutionary innovation. Wagner also argues that robustness has less to do with organisms having plenty of spare parts (the redundancy theory that has been popular) and more to do with the reality that mutations can change organisms in ways that do not substantively affect their fitness.
Unparalleled in its field, this book offers the most detailed analysis available of all facets of robustness within organisms. It will appeal not only to biologists but also to engineers interested in the design of robust systems and to social scientists concerned with robustness in human communities and populations.
Wagner shows how evolution by natural selection preferentially finds and favors robust solutions to the problems organisms face in surviving and reproducing. Such robustness, he argues, also enhances the potential for future evolutionary innovation. Wagner also argues that robustness has less to do with organisms having plenty of spare parts (the redundancy theory that has been popular) and more to do with the reality that mutations can change organisms in ways that do not substantively affect their fitness.
Unparalleled in its field, this book offers the most detailed analysis available of all facets of robustness within organisms. It will appeal not only to biologists but also to engineers interested in the design of robust systems and to social scientists concerned with robustness in human communities and populations.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
About the author
Andreas Wagner
75 books62 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author with this name on GR
Andreas Wagner is Professor in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich and an award-winning science writer. He received his PhD from Yale and has held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The author of more than 150 scientific papers published in leading journals including Nature and Science, this is his first book popularizing his new evolutionary systems research. He lives in Zurich.
Andreas Wagner is Professor in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich and an award-winning science writer. He received his PhD from Yale and has held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The author of more than 150 scientific papers published in leading journals including Nature and Science, this is his first book popularizing his new evolutionary systems research. He lives in Zurich.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 21, 2011
Interesting, but difficult book about evolution.
October 5, 2012
Far too technical a read to say I enjoyed it as such, and being that it is top-heavy with science and math this wasn't strictly a sit-down-and-read book. I admit to skimming a lot of the material, but that's okay I was far more interested in Wagner's topic than I was getting into the gritty details.
As per the title, we're dealing with robustness and evolvability in living systems; that is, how living organisms resist and adapt to change over time. Life has come up with a staggering range of robust systems thanks to its organization and the fine-tuning processes of natural selection, and Wagner goes through them step by step starting from the genetic code, genes and gene networks, RNA transcription and protein synthesis, cellular metabolism, and on up to phenotypic organization (the structure of the realized organism).
The argument here centers on resistance to perturbations within an organism that happen by way of natural mutations. Wagner argues that, while it would be interesting to discuss how organisms resist change to the environment, it would make the task far more complicated, and in any case he conjectures that robustness to genetic mutation may be more or less synonymous with resistance to environmental perturbations.
It's easy to forget just how complex biological organisms really are, and these early chapters were a good reminder. Wagner points out how, despite the seemingly chaotic nature of life, organisms are surprisingly resilient in the face of changes that you'd expect to cripple them; removing genes and proteins can result in surprisingly little loss of "fitness" in the whole organism.
The rest of the book expands on Wagner's conceptual framework for understanding how this robustness arises and how life seems to gravitate towards it. He uses the metaphor of the neutral space, which is a location of disparate, but functionally equivalent, solutions to the problems facing living beings. The neutral space is a topological construct of many dimensions (what might elsewhere be called a phase space or configuration space) that can illustrate how the "blind search" of natural selection can lead a population of organisms toward stable, robust positions in the neutral space of solutions. Indeed natural selection makes these "pits" in the fitness landscape almost inevitable, given that organisms will in effect seek them out, and those that don't find these points of local stability die out anyway. Even here, however, there is no true stability as such, as there is always a trade-off in the attributes of robustness and fragility. We are as ever riding a fine-edged knife between too much and too little order.
He caps off the book by comparing robustness via selection to robustness in non-living systems that arises by way of self-organization, including human-engineered systems.
This isn't a book I could readily recommend for casual reading because of the technical nature. We're bulging with university-level biology as well as chemistry, math with funny symbols, and it would help if you can conceptualize metric spaces (otherwise the elegance of the argument really loses cohesion). I did enjoy it for what it is, however, and if you're inclined for such things it may be worth a look.
As per the title, we're dealing with robustness and evolvability in living systems; that is, how living organisms resist and adapt to change over time. Life has come up with a staggering range of robust systems thanks to its organization and the fine-tuning processes of natural selection, and Wagner goes through them step by step starting from the genetic code, genes and gene networks, RNA transcription and protein synthesis, cellular metabolism, and on up to phenotypic organization (the structure of the realized organism).
The argument here centers on resistance to perturbations within an organism that happen by way of natural mutations. Wagner argues that, while it would be interesting to discuss how organisms resist change to the environment, it would make the task far more complicated, and in any case he conjectures that robustness to genetic mutation may be more or less synonymous with resistance to environmental perturbations.
It's easy to forget just how complex biological organisms really are, and these early chapters were a good reminder. Wagner points out how, despite the seemingly chaotic nature of life, organisms are surprisingly resilient in the face of changes that you'd expect to cripple them; removing genes and proteins can result in surprisingly little loss of "fitness" in the whole organism.
The rest of the book expands on Wagner's conceptual framework for understanding how this robustness arises and how life seems to gravitate towards it. He uses the metaphor of the neutral space, which is a location of disparate, but functionally equivalent, solutions to the problems facing living beings. The neutral space is a topological construct of many dimensions (what might elsewhere be called a phase space or configuration space) that can illustrate how the "blind search" of natural selection can lead a population of organisms toward stable, robust positions in the neutral space of solutions. Indeed natural selection makes these "pits" in the fitness landscape almost inevitable, given that organisms will in effect seek them out, and those that don't find these points of local stability die out anyway. Even here, however, there is no true stability as such, as there is always a trade-off in the attributes of robustness and fragility. We are as ever riding a fine-edged knife between too much and too little order.
He caps off the book by comparing robustness via selection to robustness in non-living systems that arises by way of self-organization, including human-engineered systems.
This isn't a book I could readily recommend for casual reading because of the technical nature. We're bulging with university-level biology as well as chemistry, math with funny symbols, and it would help if you can conceptualize metric spaces (otherwise the elegance of the argument really loses cohesion). I did enjoy it for what it is, however, and if you're inclined for such things it may be worth a look.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews