Genetics Is a Part of a Molecular Biology

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Yeanswe coligan of mine, man is patanive, just submitted a paper where we how to defend what we call license antropomorphosising. Genetics ar rather a part of a mathematical biology provides that license to do so. So i think that the jeans iview ia, it's a very powerful thinking tool in biology. I think i's one of the best tools we have to make sense of this messy world. It works especially well when those adaptations of your osermen are cind contraintuitive to the individual organism point of view.

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolution. Features are good if they help organisms survive. But should we put organisms at the center of our attention, or the genetic information that governs those features? Arvid Ågren helps us understand the attraction of the “selfish gene” view of evolution, as well as its shortcomings. This biological excursion has deep connections to philosophical issues of levels and emergence.

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Arvid Ågren received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto. He is currently a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. Previously he worked at Cornell and Harvard. His recent book is The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution.

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