Evolutionary Biology: Mechanisms and Trends

Comprehensively illustrated and written by leading researchers, this invaluable publication features papers from the annual Evolutionary Biology meetings in Marseilles. It includes a description of the life and work of the celebrated biologist J.B.S. Haldane.

The annual Evolutionary Biology Meetings in Marseilles serve to gather leading evolutionary biologists and other scientists using evolutionary biology concepts, e.g. for medical research. The aims of these meetings are to promote the exchange of ideas and to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations.

This book collects 19 selected contributions presented at the 15^th meeting, which took place in September 2011. It starts with a description of the life and work of J.B.S. Haldane, a remarkable evolutionary biologist of the 20^th century. The remaining chapters are grouped under the following three themes:

·       New Concepts in Evolutionary Biology

·       Macroevolution: Mechanisms and Trends

·       Genome Evolution

Offering an up-to-date overview of recent results in the field of evolutionary biology, this book is an invaluable source of information for scientists, teachers and advanced students.

The life and work of J.B.S. Haldane.- Cultural cladistics and the early history of North America.- Effects of random and selective mass extinction on community composition in communities of digital organisms.- Co-evolution of gene families – models, algorithms, and systems biology.- Molecular phylogenetic trees.- Protein aggregation acts as strong constraint during evolution.- Evolution of cellular pattern formation during early nematode embryogenesis.- Environmental regulation of floral color.- Variable risk and the evolution of defense repertoire of the tupelo leafminer.- Reconstruction of the adaptively advantages macro-evolutionary events in the mutualistic symbioses.- Trends of the herbs ecological evolution.- Polymorphism and adaptation of primate colour vision.- Horizontal gene transfer in influenza strain generation: a comparative evolutionary study.- The repetitive landscape of sauropsid genomes.- Evolution of viviparity and genomic imprinting in mammals by retrotransposons.- Functional retrogenes in animal genomes.- Evolution of multipartite genomes in Prokaryotes.- Differentiation of CACTA-like elements in Arabidopsis.- Alternative splicing as a source of phenotypic differences between  species: protein-level mechanisms.