James A. Shapiro: Evolution: a view from the twenty-first century

Paulien Hogeweg

doi:10.1007/s12065-012-0069-4

Abstract

James A. Shapiro: Evolution: a view from the twenty-first century

Highlights

Most readers of and contributers to this journal are likely to interpret ‘‘evolutionary intelligence’’ as the use of population based search techniques with random mutations and selection to generate ‘intelligent’ behavior
In the second part ‘‘the genome as read-write storage system’’ he reviews ways in which DNA is modified. In my opinion this is the nicest part of the book and touches on biological processes which are least well known outside biology
He emphasises the larger scale modification, through e.g. transposons which make up the largest part of the DNA of higher eukaryotes like us. He describes the somatic recombination and editing which is employed in the immune system, and the recently discovered CRISPR system as ’immune’ system in bacteria, where parts of viruses are incorporated in the genome, and therewith helps to fight

Summary

Introduction

Most readers of and contributers to this journal are likely to interpret ‘‘evolutionary intelligence’’ as the use of population based search techniques with random mutations and selection to generate ‘intelligent’ behavior. The book builds up to these ideas through a very nice overview of current biological knowledge about information processing in cells. P. Hogeweg (&) Theoretical Biology and Bionformatics, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: p.hogeweg@uu.nl provides additional, more detailed information of some of the discussed processes online (together almost 100 pages, including (again) references).

Results

Conclusion