Product Description

All living things are remarkably complex, yet their DNA is unstable, undergoing countless random mutations over generations. Despite this instability, most animals do not grow two heads or die, plants continue to thrive, and bacteria continue to divide. Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems tackles this perplexing paradox. The book explores why genetic changes do not cause organisms to fail catastrophically and how evolution shapes organisms' robustness. Andreas Wagner looks at this problem from the ground up, starting with the alphabet of DNA, the genetic code, RNA, and protein molecules, moving on to genetic networks and embryonic development, and working his way up to whole organisms. He then develops an evolutionary explanation for robustness.

Wagner shows how evolution by natural selection preferentially finds and favors robust solutions to the problems organisms face in surviving and reproducing. Such robustness, he argues, also enhances the potential for future evolutionary innovation. Wagner also argues that robustness has less to do with organisms having plenty of spare parts (the redundancy theory that has been popular) and more to do with the reality that mutations can change organisms in ways that do not substantively affect their fitness.

Unparalleled in its field, this book offers the most detailed analysis available of all facets of robustness within organisms. It will appeal not only to biologists but also to engineers interested in the design of robust systems and to social scientists concerned with robustness in human communities and populations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #929272 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Review
"... is sure to lay the foundation for growth of research in this underappreciated field of study". -- Greg Gibson, Science

Review
Wagner's treatise is more than good biology; it is also very interesting biology. The picture is painted by talented hands. . . . If I have a favorite aspect of the book, it is the meticulous yet insightful analysis of neutral spaces and their relevance for the main themes of the book.
(Eors Szathmary Nature )

Wagner contributes significantly to the emerging view that natural selection is just one, and maybe not even the most fundamental, source of biological order. His two-page epilogue throws out seven open questions for systems biologists and neo-Darwinians to consider; hopefully they will do so.
(g Gibson," Science )

This book is invaluable for everybody interested in robustness. . . . I predict that for many years to come, Wagner's book will be the bibliographic reference work of choice for research on robustness.
(Claus O. Wilke BioScience )

Unparalleled in its field, this book offers the most detailed analysis available of all facets of robustness within organisms. It will appeal not only to biologists but also to engineers interested in the design of robust systems and to social scientists concerned with robustness in human communities and populations.
(Ethnology, Ecology, and Evolution )

Review
This is a timely book that should appeal to biologists, engineers, and applied mathematicians.
(David C. Krakauer, Santa Fe Institute )

Customer Reviews

Scholarly account of an important subject
Living organisms are both robust and evolvable -- two properties that could seem to contradict one another. They are robust in the sense that they can withstand, both as individuals and as lineages, changes in their environment, changes that are sometimes very large. At the same time they can evolve, which means that they leave descendants that remain well adapted to their environment through many generations. Without these two properties life could not have survived from its beginnings billions of years ago to the present, despite huge changes in the earth during that time, such as the change from a reducing atmosphere to the current oxidizing atmosphere, with concentrations of oxygen in the air and the oceans that would be lethal for all of the early organisms.

As Andreas Wagner explains in this important book, the two properties of robustness and evolvability exist at many different levels: the genetic code, the structures of nucleic acids and proteins, metabolism, body plans, and so on. He goes on to analyse each of these and others in different chapters. In each chapter he sets out to answer the same two questions: what characteristic is robust? what is it robust to? For example, the three-dimensional structure of a protein, necessary for maintaining its function, is robust to changes in its aminoacid sequence.

Wagner was one of the originators of the "small world" view of metabolism -- the finding that the number of steps needed to go from any metabolite to any other is much smaller than one might guess without doing the analysis -- and has recent research publications in most of the topics he discusses in his book. As a result he has produced an expert account of robustness that anyone interested in this important topic needs to be familiar with.

Important book for anyone interested in systems thinking in biology
This is a well written monograph on two fundamental but often contradictory properties of living entities: evolvability and robustness. The text gives multiple examples in which a system is robust (sort of dynamically stable) in one respect while retains a window of opportunities for change in another respect. This book is potentially interesting for traditional scientists ("reductionists" by habit) as well as holistically motivated modern biologists. I believe it is so well written and organized that it could become a must read for anyone interested in systems biology, whatever the latter term means today.
Perhaps a word of caution should be issued here for the readers who intend to learn about systems thinking regarding living matter. The assumption of very specific characteristics that a system is robust to is oversimplification of real problems in life sciences. So is a choice of specific properties according to which the system could evolve. The real living entities are complex in a sense that a very enumeration of their characteristics is a hopeless problem in itself. In contrast, the chemical models of these entities can be described in terms of selected (enumerated) characteristics. From this point of view this book is not really about living systems but about their very specific chemical models. Having said that, I hasten to state again that the book is a great reading and should be read.