Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Interplay of Selection, Accident, Neutrality, and Function (Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity)

Today evolution is analyzed at very different levels, from paleontology to molecular biology and even computer science; from the commercial use of evolutionary drug design to the innovation of new and highly abstract mathematics. Nonetheless, common phenomena and common problems relate evolutionary behaviors as they appear in these different arenas. Examples include stepwise rather than gradual time courses of evolutionary adaptation, the role of selectively neutral variants in optimization, the destabilization of evolutionary memory as a function of parameters (error thresholds), the emergence of novel dynamical behaviors induced by finite populations, and the lack of a theory for genotype-phenotype relations and for emergent functionality. New paradigms and metaphors - such as self-organization, complex adaptive systems, phase transitions, and stochastic dynamical systems - will help to achieve progress and hopefully a new level of integration in analyzing these difficult problems. This book presents a wide range of research on these cross-cutting topics. The workshop out of which they came brought together physicists and computer scientists, on the one hand, and molecular, developmental, and macro-evolutionary biologists, on the other. The dialogue that emerges from the collection as a whole sheds new light on the richness and difficulty of evolutionary dynamics.