GENIC AND ORGANISMIC SELECTION

Essays on Darwinism 3: Genic and Organismic Selection

The notion that genes play a uniquely distinguished rôle in biological evolution has been championed by Richard Dawkins (1976; 1989b). Furthermore, Dawkins has argued that this idea can be generalised in a way which makes it applicable to any properly Darwinian evolutionary process, at least if that process gives rise to a growth in adaptive complexity (Dawkins 1983). It is evident, therefore, ...

Dublincity U Niversity Essays on Darwinism 3: Genic and Organismic Selection School of Electronic Engineering

The notion that genes play a uniquely distinguished rôle in biological evolution has been championed by Richard Dawkins (1976; 1989b). Furthermore, Dawkins has argued that this idea can be generalised in a way which makes it applicable to any properly Darwinian evolutionary process, at least if that process gives rise to a growth in adaptive complexity (Dawkins 1983). It is evident, therefore, ...

Synopsis of organismic theory.

Selection on the genic location of disruptive elements.

Analyses of nucleotide patterns in coding regions of prokaryotes have revealed that selection acts on DNA and RNA stability and on translational accuracy. Here we examine the positions of mononucleotide repeats within microbial genes and detect a pervasive bias in the locations of these disruptive elements that becomes more pronounced with increases in repeat length. We argue that, because thes...

Organismic Supercategories and Qualitative Dynamics of Sys..

The representation of biological systems by means of organismic supercategories, developed in previous papers, is further discussed. The different approaches to relational biology, developed by Rashevsky, Rosen and by Baianu and Marinescu, are compared with Qualitative Dynamics of Systems which was initiated by Henri Poincaré (1881). On the basis of this comparison some concrete results concern...