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These essays are intended to provide useful advice to "biologists in the trenches" but also to assess the larger theoretical and conceptual issues that form the basis of the current controversy." "This volume will serve to substantially advance the debate over adaptationism. It will be of interest to biologists, philosophers and historians of biology, anthropologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists."--BOOK JACKET.
Philosophy of Experimental Biology explores some central philosophical issues concerning scientific research in experimental biology, including genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, and microbiology. It seeks to make sense of the explanatory strategies, concepts, ways of reasoning, approaches to discovery and problem solving, tools, models and experimental systems deployed by scientific life science researchers and also integrates developments in historical scholarship, in particular the New Experimentalism. It concludes that historical explanations of scientific change that are based on local laboratory practice need to be supplemented with an account of the epistemic norms and standards that are operative in science. This book should be of interest to philosophers and historians of science as well as to scientists.
The enormous complexity of biological systems at the molecular level must be answered with powerful computational methods. Computational biology is a young field, but has seen rapid growth and advancement over the past few decades. Surveying the progress made in this multidisciplinary field, the Handbook of Computational Molecular Biology of
One of the most controversial contemporary debates on the concept of health is the clash between the views of naturalists and normativists. Naturalists argue that, although health can be valued or disvalued, the concept of health is itself objective and value-free. In contrast, normativists argue that health is a contextual and value-laden concept, and that there is no possibility of a value-free understanding of health. This debate has fueled many of the, often very acrimonious, disputations arising from the claims of health, disease and disability activists and charities and the public policy responses to them. In responding to this debate, Ananth both surveys the existing literature, with special focus on the work of Christopher Boorse, and argues that a naturalistic concept of health, drawing on evolutionary considerations associated with biological function, homeostasis, and species-design, is defensible without jettisoning norms in their entirety.
Historically, philosophers of biology have tended to sidestep the problem of development by focusing primarily on evolutionary biology and, more recently, on molecular biology and genetics. Quite often too, development has been misunderstood as simply, or even primarily, a matter of gene activation and regulation. Nowadays a growing number of philosophers of science are focusing their analyses on the complexities of development, and in Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution Jason Scott Robert explores the nature of development against current trends in biological theory and practice and looks at the interrelations between development and evolution (evo-devo), an area of resurgent biological interest. Clearly written, this book should be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology.
Evolutionary Behavioral Ecology presents a comprehensive treatment of theevolutionary and ecological processes shaping behavior across a wide array of organisms and a diverse set of behaviors and is suitable as a graduate-level text and as a sourcebook for professional scientists.
Evolutionary Ecology simultaneously unifies conceptual and empirical advances in evolutionary ecology and provides a volume that can be used as either a primary textbook or a supplemental reading in an advanced undergraduate or graduate course. The focus of the book is on current concepts in evolutionary ecology, and the empirical study of these concepts. The editors have assembled a group of prominent biologists who have made significant contributions to this field. They both synthesize the current state of knowledge and identity areas for future investigation. Evolutionary Ecology will be of general interest to researchers and students in both ecology and evolutionary biology. Researchers in evolutionary ecology that want an overview of the current state of the field, and graduate students that want an introduction the field, will find this book very valuable. This volume can also be used as a primary textbook or supplemental reading in both upper division and graduate courses/seminars in Evolutionary Ecology.
There is long-standing disagreement among systematists about how to divide biodiversity into species. Over twenty different species concepts are used to group organisms, according to criteria as diverse as morphological or molecular similarity, interbreeding and genealogical relationships. This, combined with the implications of evolutionary biology, raises the worry that either there is no single kind of species, or that species are not real. This book surveys the history of thinking about species from Aristotle to modern systematics in order to understand the origin of the problem, and advocates a solution based on the idea of the division of conceptual labor, whereby species concepts function in different ways - theoretically and operationally. It also considers related topics such as individuality and the metaphysics of evolution, and how scientific terms get their meaning. This important addition to the current debate will be essential for philosophers and historians of science, and for biologists.
Bechtel emphasises how mechanisms were discovered by cell biologists and the instruments that made these inquiries possible.
Presents algorithmic techniques for solving problems in bioinformatics, including applications that shed new light on molecular biology This book introduces algorithmic techniques in bioinformatics, emphasizing their application to solving novel problems in post-genomic molecular biology. Beginning with a thought-provoking discussion on the role of algorithms in twenty-first-century bioinformatics education, Bioinformatics Algorithms covers: General algorithmic techniques, including dynamic programming, graph-theoretical methods, hidden Markov models, the fast Fourier transform, seeding, and approximation algorithms Algorithms and tools for genome and sequence analysis, including formal and ...