Book Description
'Phylogenetics' is the reconstruction and analysis of phylogenetic (evolutionary) trees and networks based on inherited characteristics. It is a flourishing area of intereaction between mathematics, statistics, computer science and biology. The main role of phylogenetic techniques lies in evolutionary biology, where it is used to infer historical relationships between species. However, the methods are also relevant to a diverse range of fields including epidemiology, ecology, medicine, as well as linguistics and cognitive psychology This graduate-level book, based on the authors lectures at The University of Canterbury, New Zealand, focuses on the mathematical aspects of phylogenetics. It brings together the central results of the field (providing proofs of the main theorem), outlines their biological significance,and indicates how algorithms may be derived. The presentation is self-contained and relies on discrete mathematics with some probability theory. A set of exercises and at least one specialist topic ends each chapter. This book is intended for biologists interested in the mathematical theory behind phylogenetic methods, and for mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists eager to learn about this emerging area of discrete mathematics. 'Phylogenetics' in the 24th volume in the Oxford Lecture Series in Mathematics and its Applications. This series contains short books suitable for graduate students and researchers who want a well-written account of mathematics that is fundamental to current to research. The series emphasises future directions of research and focuses on genuine applications of mathematics to finance, engineering and the physical and biological sciences.
Customer Reviews:
Good, for the dedicated reader.......2004-02-18
Starting with genes, proteins, or other biological traits, phylogenetics is about describing relationships between them. Phylogenetics tries to estimate "family trees" given only the family members visible today - exact lineage is guesswork, since the parents, grandparents, and shared heritage can never be known.
This book offers deep analysis of one family of techniques for deducing possible trees. It gives a very thorough, formal description of ways to examine and resolve different sources of information, or to determine that they can not be resolved. It offers minute analysis of ways to take subsets of the whole family, analyze the subsets, then merge the subset conclusions together, as much as possible. It also addresses the statistical character of the tree-building problem. The reader who masters this material has a powerful set of tools for phylogenetic analysis.
That reader must be truly dedicated, though. The first two chapters read like mathematical graph theory (because they are). The next few chapters are also highly mathematical, but offer a bit more biological insight. I'm not a mathematician, so I find this book tough going. The graph-theoretic conclusions give wonderful insight into combining information from multiple traits and in noting points of conflict. It takes me a while, though, to unwind the formal notation enough to attach biological meaning to it. There are a few helpful statistical analyses, but they could be missed - the more familiar kinds of statistics are hidden among the combinatorics and tree perturbations. Later chapters revisit familiar topics like parsimony and Markov models, but with theoretical depth that's hard to find elsewhere.
Within the whole gamut of phylogenetic techniques now used, this book addresses only one range. Within that range, however, Semple and Steel have done a fine job of showing the theory behind those techniques. I value the insights that this book brings. Even so, it's not always easy to dislodge those insights from the solid slabs of proofs in which they are embedded. I appreciate the demonstration of NP-completeness of specific problems, but I can't always apply that knowledge to the biology I want to address.
Anyone devoted to mastering every nuance of phylogenetic analysis should read this book. It goes beyond the needs of most application developers, though. It probably won't say much at all to those who just use the results of analysis; it simply does not address any particular application that an analyst might use. If you have the determination to understand and the patience to pick out the understanding, you'll find a lot to like in "Phylogenetics".
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Lectures on Nonlinear Evolution Equations: Initial Value Problems (Aspects of Mathematics Ser)
Reinhard Racke
Manufacturer: Ballen Booksellers Intl
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ASIN: 3528064218 |
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Winner of the Schumpeter Prize, 2000
Winner of the Smith Prize in Austrian Economics, 2000
This book explores now the limitations of human knowledge create opportunities as well as problems in the modern economy. The burgeoning field of evolutionary economics has developed as a result of the traditional failure of the discipline to explain certain phenomena that impact greatly on the economy.
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Brain in Hominid Evolution (James Arthur Lectures on the Evolution of the Human Brain, 1969)
Phillip V. Tobias
Manufacturer: Columbia Univ Pr
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A world-famous scientist presents a synthesis of modern views on the principles of evolution. The result of twenty-five years of research, "The Meaning of Evolution" follows the rise and fall of the dynasties of life through the 2,000,000,000 years of the history of earth. It explains what forces have been acting to bring about evolution and re-examines human aims, values, and duties in the light of what science discloses of the nature of man and of his place in the history of life. "The clearest and soundest exposition of the nature of the evolutionary process that has yet been written. . . . The book may be read with equal profit and pleasure by the general reader, the student, and the expert."-Ashley Montagu, Isis "This book is, without question, the best general work on the meaning of evolution to appear in our time."-The New York Times
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The Easter Festival in the Evolution of the Mysteries: Four Lectures Given in Dornach; April 19-22, 1924
Rudolf Steiner
Manufacturer: Steiner Books
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According to Derek Bickerton, language is not simply for communication, it is the syntax of human consciousness. In this intriguing look at the origins of consciousness, Bickerton offers a tantalizing alternative to the theories of sociobiologists such as E. O. Wilson and strong artificial intelligence theorists such as Daniel Dennett: Syntax, as hard-wired into the brain, is what distinguishes the consciousness of modern humans from that of animals and human ancestors. A remarkably accessible argument and sure to stir up debate for some time to come.
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Talking Apes.......2007-06-12
By any measure, humans are pretty amazing animals. Only humans build cities, drive cars, fly airplanes, surf the Internet and write book reviews to post on Amazon. Clearly intelligence is what underlies all these abilities, but where does our intellectual endowment come from? The standard explanation has to do with brain-to-body ratio, which is far greater in humans than in any other species. On this view, our big brains make us more intelligent, giving us the ability to solve problems, make plans and communicate with each other effectively. Because it seems obvious that intelligence is advantageous to survival, it is assumed that it would be selected for and that evolution would push hominids towards larger and larger brains.
However, linguist Derek Bickerton takes issue with the standard model. In particular with regard to the relationship between intelligence and language, he believes the evolutionary scientists have the process backwards. Instead of viewing language as a product of intelligence, Bickerton argues instead that intelligence is a product of language. In "Language and Human Behavior," Bickerton presents the case that humans stumbled upon language, which then drove brain expansion and intelligence.
Bickerton argues that language evolved in two stages, and that "fossils" of the first stage still exist today. The distinction he makes here is between proto-language and full language. Proto-language has a limited vocabulary and no syntax; it is spoken in a halting fashion and has limited range of expression compared to full language. Full language, other the other hand, is represented by English, Chinese, or any other language spoken in the world. It also includes most signed languages, as well as the languages of so-called "primitive" peoples. (It should be noted that while their technologies are primitive compared to ours, their languages are every bit as complex.)
The speech of young children is one example of proto-language. From about one year of age until around age three, children's vocabularies are extremely limited, and the utterances they produce are simple, typically consisting of a single word or a two-to-three word string. A second example of proto-language is pidgins. When adults who do not speak a common language are forced to live and work together, they quickly develop a simple communication system consisting of a small vocabulary and virtually no syntax. Pidgins have arisen naturally many times over recorded history. A third example of proto-language comes from attempts to teach language to apes. In some cases, primates (and even a parrot) have been able to learn a vocabulary of several hundred words that they can understand and produce; however, they never seem to pick up on the rules of syntax. Finally, some mentally disabled and aphasics are only able to produce short, halting utterances with the same characteristics of proto-language.
Bickerton reviews the evidence on human evolution and argues that a punctuated-equilibrium approach best explains the data. Technological advancement (as judged by tool remains) has proceeded in a stepwise fashion from homo habilis to homo erectus to homo sapiens. That is, there is some technological advancement at the rise of each new species, followed by a long period of stagnation. And then around fifty thousand years ago there was a "great leap forward," from which time human technology has been advancing apace. Bickerton maintains that such a fossil record is inconsistent with a gradualist approach. Rather, some important change occurred two million years ago in homo habilis, and then again in homo sapiens fifty thousand years ago.
What made homo habilis different from any other primate, Bickerton speculates, is proto-language. Having stumbled upon a simple communication system, homo habilis was now able to coordinate group activity toward directed goals. Just as half an eye is better than no eye at all, proto-language gave homo habilis a significant evolutionary advantage. It also gave them a means for thinking out problems.
Continuing in this line of thought, Bickerton explains the great leap forward fifty thousand years ago by the advent of full language. A key difference between proto-language and full language is syntax, which allows for complex thought, including causal inferences. Thus, Bickerton argues, human intelligence arose from language, and not the other way around.
In the remainder of the book, Bickerton fleshes out his theory of linguistically driven intelligence. First, he makes a distinction between on-line and off-line thinking. On-line thinking involves direct interaction with the environment; inputs are received by the senses and processed by the brain, which then programs responses. Driving a car is a good example of on-line thinking in humans. Any creature with a nervous system engages in on-line thinking, although the degree of complexity varies greatly from species to species. Off-line thinking, on the other hand, is detached from the immediate environment, and operates on mental models instead. Making future plans, abstract problem solving and hypothetical supposition are all examples of off-line thinking. As far as we know, only humans engage in off-line thinking.
Language is related to thinking by the way each type of thinking is represented. On-line thinking works on sensory inputs and motor outputs, and Bickerton calls such a system a primary representational system. But off-line thinking operates on abstract representations that have no direct connection to the immediate environment. Bickerton calls such a system a secondary representational system, and he argues that it is language that provides these abstract representations.
Bickerton swims against the mainstream; however, his arguments are not without merit. Most evolutionary scientists do not fully appreciate the complexity of language and discount its importance, viewing it simply as a communication system only tangentially related to thinking and intelligence. Most linguists are woefully (and sometimes even blissfully) ignorant of human evolution, and do not even attempt to build linguistic theories that are evolutionary plausible. Bickerton is well versed in both fields, and so both evolutionary scientists and linguists alike should pay heed to what he has to say.
Human Cognition Came Out of Syntax.......2004-04-17
If you like Dennett's books, I urge you to read this one, "Language and Human Bahavior", by Bickerton. The whole book, which is not long, developes a single argument clearly and cogently. It is Vytgotsky's argument (see "Thought and Language" written in 1934), but updated and expanded. In Bickerton's own words: "human cognition came out of language" (page 160), though the title of this review is more exact. So Vygotsky from psychology and Bickerton from linguistics reach the same heretical conclusion. I believe very deeply that they are right.
Summary: The book is very interesting and very well written; it was easy reading for me. It deserves the best score and I strongly recommend it.
Intelligence came from language, not vice versa.......2000-06-12
It is easy to suspect that we humans can talk because we have smart brains. Bickerton instead argues that as our brains developed the capacity for speech we thereby became smart. Like other animals we have "on-line" thinking to help us survive. This consists of sensory('objective') knowledge of the world and ('subjective') inner states of consciousness. These latter are sometimes automatic responses to sensory knowledge --when you see a lion slinking, run! Sometimes they are awareness of inner states such as pain or body position. On-line thinking is automatic, either instinctual or a kind of learned stimulus-response process. But humans also have "off-line" consciousness. This consists of mental representations of the world and of ourselves, but even of events that are not really occuring. We can think about things not present to us, far away or in the past or in possible futures. So we can evaluate possibilities and make choices in our head; we can plan ahead. Bickerton uses his expertise in pidgin and creole languages to compare different kinds of thought. By this he shows that full "online" thinking is much more than koko, washoe, and kanzi, the sign-using primates (and two-year old children for that matter) are able to do. How he gets from pidgin and creoles to his conclusions is a major aspect of the book. He does it clearly and elegantly. Overall, he argues that as the mind developed capacity for full language, it was also developing the capacity to formulate, hold on to, and manipulate concepts and the relations among them. This language skill is also skill at thinking. So as the human brain developed the structures and connections to make language possible, this created the possibility of offline thought--the power to manipulate ideas well beyond the limits of ordinary "online" sensory experience and flash responses to those experiences.
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An Introduction to Semilinear Evolution Equations (Oxford Lecture Series in Mathematics and Its Applications , No 13)
Thierry Cazenave , and
Alain Haraux
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Semilinear Schrodinger Equations (Courant Lecture Notes)
ASIN: 019850277X |
Book Description
This book presents an upper level text on semilinear evolutionary partial differential equations aimed at the graduate and postgraduate level. Cazenave and Haraux present in a self-contained way, the typical basic properties of solutions to semi-linear evolutionary partial differential equations, with special emphasis on global properties. The main objective of this book is to provide a didactic approach to the subject , and the main readership will be graduate students in mathematical analysis, as well as professional applied mathematicians.
Book Description
This book is devoted to a theory of gradient flows in spaces which are not necessarily endowed with a natural linear or differentiable structure. It consists of two parts, the first one concerning gradient flows in metric spaces and the second one devoted to gradient flows in the space of probability measures on a separable Hilbert space, endowed with the Kantorovich-Rubinstein-Wasserstein distance.
The two parts have some connections, due to the fact that the space of probability measures provides an important model to which the "metric" theory applies, but the book is conceived in such a way that the two parts can be read independently, the first one by the reader more interested in non-smooth analysis and analysis in metric spaces, and the second one by the reader more orientated towards the applications in partial differential equations, measure theory and probability.
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Genetic Programming: 9th European Conference, EuroGP 2006, Budapest, Hungary, April 10-12, 2006. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 3540331433 |
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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2006, held in Budapest, Hungary, in April 2006, colocated with EvoCOP 2006.
The 21 revised plenary papers and 11 revised poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers address fundamental and theoretical issues, along with a wide variety of papers dealing with different application areas, such as computer science, engineering, machine learning, Kolmogorov complexity, biology and computational design, showing that GP is a powerful and practical problem-solving paradigm.
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- The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
- The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
- The City Of Light: The Hidden Journal of the Man Who Entered China Four Years Before Marco Polo
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