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At a time of unprecedented expansion in the life sciences,
evolution is the one theory that transcends all of biology. Any
observation of a living system must ultimately be interpreted in
the context of its evolution. Evolutionary change is the
consequence of mutation and natural selection, which are two
concepts that can be described by mathematical
equations."Evolutionary Dynamics" is concerned with these equations
of life. In this book, Martin Nowak draws on the languages of
biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles
according to which life evolves. His work introduces readers to the
powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living
systems, no matter how complicated they might seem.
Evolution has become a mathematical theory, Nowak suggests, and
any idea of an evolutionary process or mechanism should be studied
in the context of the mathematical equations of evolutionary
dynamics. His book presents a range of analytical tools that can be
used to this end: fitness landscapes, mutation matrices, genomic
sequence space, random drift, quasispecies, replicators, the
Prisoner's Dilemma, games in finite and infinite populations,
evolutionary graph theory, games on grids, evolutionary
kaleidoscopes, fractals, and spatial chaos. Nowak then shows how
evolutionary dynamics applies to critical real-world problems,
including the progression of viral diseases such as AIDS, the
virulence of infectious agents, the unpredictable mutations that
lead to cancer, the evolution of altruism, and even the evolution
of human language. His book makes a clear and compelling case for
understanding every living system--and everything that arises as a
consequence of livingsystems--in terms of evolutionary
dynamics.
According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution,
selfish behaviors that maximize an organism's reproductive
potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing
behaviors-rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a
mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God
addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working
alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in
populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency
to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as
beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be
decisive in evolutionary dynamics. Assembling experts in
mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy,
and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an
interdisciplinary approach to the terms "cooperation" and
"altruism." Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by
which cooperation-a form of working together in which one
individual benefits at the cost of another-arises through natural
selection. They then examine altruism-cooperation which includes
the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the
collective good-as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain
the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the
spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural
transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of
meaning. The authors resist the presumption that theology and
evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally
presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena
of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and
theology to be strongly compatible.
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