Lectures On Biology

Biophysical models have been used in biology for decades, but they have been limited in scope and size. In this book, Bernhard Ø. Palsson shows how network reconstructions that are based on genomic and bibliomic data, and take the form of established stoichiometric matrices, can be converted into dynamic models using metabolomic and fluxomic data. The Mass Action Stoichiometric Simulation (MASS) procedure can be used for any cellular process for which data is available and allows a scalable step-by-step approach to the practical construction of network models. Specifically, it can treat integrated processes that need explicit accounting of small molecules and protein, which allows simulation at the molecular level. The material has been class-tested by the author at both the undergraduate and graduate level. All computations in the text are available online in MATLAB® and Mathematica® workbooks, allowing hands-on practice with the material.

The first comprehensive single-authored textbook on genome-scale models and the bottom-up approach to systems biology.

R. C. Lewontin is a prominent scientist -- a geneticist who teaches at Harvard -- yet he believes that we have placed science on a pedestal, treating it as an objective body of knowledge that transcends all other ways of knowing and all other endeavours. Lewontin writes in this collection of essays, which began their life as CBC Radio's Massey Lectures Series for 1990: "Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience... . Science, like the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and vices of society at each historical epoch." In Biology as Ideology Lewontin examines the false paths down which modern scientific ideology has led us. By admitting science's limitations, he helps us rediscover the richness of nature -- and appreciate the real value of science.

Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. What goes on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happens? Then he pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell triggers the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones act hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli which trigger the nervous system? By now, he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. Sapolsky keeps going--next to what features of the environment affected that person's brain, and then back to the childhood of the individual, and then to their genetic makeup. Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual. How culture has shaped that individual's group, what ecological factors helped shape that culture, and on and on, back to evolutionary factors thousands and even millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours de horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.

Excerpt from Lectures on Biology This book consists of Lectures which were given by me during the winter terms of 1905 to 1907 at the Humboldt Academy and the Urania in Berlin. My object in delivering them was to show that it is no longer possible, having regard to the advances of modern research, to find complete satisfaction in being an out-and-out believer in the Darwinian or Lamarckian or any other theory. Each of these doctrines has rendered important service in promoting our knowledge, but the marks of their limitations have of recent years become increasingly distinct. The factors which the different doctrines assume to be at work in the genesis and evolution of the organic world are, however, not exclusive, for the Theory of Selection, the Doctrine of Adaptation and of Use and Non-use, and finally de Vries' Theory of Mutations, offer each for a certain section of organic evolution a sufficient and satisfactory explanation. That, on the other hand, a vast field of vital processes remains still hidden and unexplained only dogmatic prejudice will venture to deny. If I have succeeded in conveying to a wider circle this conception of conflicting theories, and if I have further succeeded in showing that incomprehensible does not mean impossible to comprehend, my object in publishing these Lectures in book form has been attained. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.