To what extent does the future govern the present in our lives? In an earlier blog (Time: Real and Imagined; January 2, 2016), I raised this question. Let’s say I was guaranteed (impossible, of course) that I would live an extended life, but I was also assured that planet Earth would be destroyed a year [...]
In her comprehensive biography, The Invention of Nature (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), Andrea Wulf tells how Alexander Humboldt (1769 -1859) was the first to understand that the natural world “was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’.” Humboldt saw “unity in variety.” He was the first to consider different plants, animals and inanimate nature interdependent and [...]
“It has been a dogma of evolutionary biology that gene duplication precedes the evolution for a new gene and protein function. Joram Piatigorsky stands this scenario on its head by showing that, tin the case of lens crystallins and probably other families, functional diversity can precede gene duplication. This revolutionary perspective proceeds unexpected insight into [...]
“This book introduces, explains and elaborates on the very interesting face that some genes produce proteins that serve different (and important) functions in the same organism. This is a remarkable story well told and intersting from both evolutionary and functional perspectives." - Russel D. Fernald, Stanford University
