25 Novembre 2007

Riflessioni sulla biologia moderna

Ecco il saggio:The new biology: beyond the Modern SynthesisMichael R Rose,  Todd H Oakley Biology Direct 2007, 2:30Dal sito della rivsta 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 […]

Ecco il saggio:
The new biology: beyond the Modern Synthesis
Michael R Rose,  Todd H Oakley
Biology Direct 2007, 2:30
Dal sito della rivsta riporto:
Background: The last third of the 20th Century featured an accumulation of research
findings that severely challenged the assumptions of the “Modern Synthesis” which
provided the foundations for most biological research during that century. The
foundations of that “Modernist” biology had thus largely crumbled by the start of the 21st
Century. 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 at
the start of the 21st Century is achieving a substantive maturity of theory, experimental
tools, 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 on
the genomic stage. Biologists are now addressing the evolution of genetic systems using
more than the concepts of population biology alone, and the problems of cell biology
using more than the tools of biochemistry and molecular biology alone. It is becoming
increasingly clear that solutions to such basic problems as aging, sex, development, and
genome size potentially involve elements of biological science at every level of
organization, from molecule to population. The new biology knits together genomics,
bioinformatics, evolutionary genetics, and other such general-purpose tools to supply
novel explanations for the paradoxes that undermined Modernist

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Paolo Coccia