Complexity_ A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell [163]
“The significance of non-coding RNA”: For a discussion of some of the current research and controversies in this area, see Hüttenhofer, A., Scattner, P., and Polacek, N., Non-coding RNAs: Hope or Hype? Trends in Genetics, 21 (5), 2005, pp. 289–297.
“The presumption that genes operate independently”: Caruso, D., A challenge to gene theory, a tougher look at biotech. New York Times, July 1, 2007.
“encode a specific functional product”: U.S. patent law, quoted in ibid.
“Evidence of a networked genome shatters the scientific basis”: Ibid.
“more than 90% of our DNA is shared with mice”: Published estimates of DNA overlap between humans and different species differ. However, it seems that “over 90% shared” is a fairly safe statement.
“a ‘black box’ that somehow transformed genetic information”: Carroll, S. B., Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005, p. 7.
“The irony … is that what was dismissed as junk”: In the video Gene Regulation; Science, 319, no 5871, 2008.
“To verify that the BMP4 gene itself could indeed trigger the growth”: From Yoon, C. K., From a few genes, life’s myriad shapes. New York Times, June 26, 2007.
“In a strange but revealing experiment”: This work is described in Travis, J., Eye-opening gene. Science News Online, May 10, 1997.
“This conclusion is still quite controversial among evolutionary biologists”: For discussion of this controversy, see, e.g., Erwin, D. H., The developmental origins of animal bodyplans. In S. Xiao and A. J. Kaufman (editors), Neoproterozoic Geobiology and Paleobiology, New York: Springer, 2006, pp. 159–197.
“a world-class intellectual riffer”: Horgan, J., From complexity to perplexity. Scientific American, 272, June 1995, pp. 74–79.
“the genomic networks that control development”: Kauffman, S. A., At Home in the Universe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 26.
“life exists at the edge of chaos”: Ibid, p. 26.
“Most biologists, heritors of the Darwinian tradition”: Ibid, p. 25.
“a ‘candidate fourth law of thermodynamics’”: Kauffman, S. J., Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 3.
“Kauffman’s book: The Origins of Order”: Kauffman, S. A., The Origins of Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
“a fundamental reinterpretation of the place of selection”: Burian, R. M. and Richardson, R. C., Form and order in evolutionary biology: Stuart Kauffman’s transformation of theoretical biology. In PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol. 2: Symposia and Invited Papers, 1990, pp. 267–287.
“His approach opens up new vistas”: Ibid.
“the first serious attempt to model a complete biology”: Bak, P., How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. New York: Springer, 1996.
“dangerously seductive”: Dover, G. A., On the edge. Nature, 365, 1993, pp. 704–706.
“There are times when the bracing walk through hyperspace”: Ibid.
“noise has a significant effect on the behavior of RBNs”: E.g., see Goodrich, C. S. and Matache, M. T., The stabilizing effect of noise on the dynamics of a Boolean network. Physica A, 379(1), 2007, pp. 334–356.
“It has essentially become a matter of social responsibility”: Hoelzer, G. A., Smith, E., and Pepper, J. W., On the logical relationship between natural selection and self-organization. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 19 (6), 2007, pp. 1785–1794.
“Evolutionary biologist Dan McShea has given me a useful way to think about these various issues”: D. W. McShea, personal communication.
“Evolutionary biology is in a state of intellectual chaos”: D. W. McShea, personal communication.
Part V
“I will put Chaos into fourteen lines”: In Millay, E. St. Vincent, Mine the Harvest: A Collection of New Poems. New York: Harper, 1949, p. 130.
Chapter 19
“John Horgan published an article