Introduction I (Evo21): A Fresh Look at the Basics of Evolution in the New Century

"How does novelty arise in evolution?" is a key question the author concentrates the reader's attention. It is important to realize that evolution is all about change. Thus, in order to have a rigorous empirical foundation for evolution one needs to show what changes occur and how.

Evolution 21st Century (Evo21): Structure of the Book

After acknowledgments and technical information, the book presents the information on the author, James Shapiro. We will not reiterate that in here, but rather send the reader to the Internet searching machines or to the book itself. One point, however, deserving mentioning is that the author is not a random person in genetics, molecular biology, and microbiology. The list of significant achievements and break-through contributions to biology is impressive. That is what the reader needs to know as the biological evolution topic is so flooded with spurious activities trying to falsify and compromise the subject. Finally, the author shows reverence to Barbara McClintock for "opening his eyes to new ways of thinking about science in general and evolution in particular."

Music of Life by Denis Noble. Summary. Part I.

Molecular biology has advanced quite rapidly in the past few decades, especially after the discovery of the DNA in 1953. However, in order to gain the fruits from this significant scientific leap, the reductionist molecular and genetic approach is not enough, explaining why the benefits from molecular biology in health care is relatively slow compared to the advances in this interesting scientific field. This book is about systems biology, where the author focuses on the fact that it is not possible to understand the logic behind the system from studying the system’s components only. The molecular and cellular components are in fact interacting in a balanced symphonic harmony which Noble calls the music of life.

“Do you not know that our soul is composed of harmony?“, Leonardo da Vinci

Intensive reading club

Intelligent biology is an intensive reading club dedicated to biology. Our aim is to scrutinise the major achievements in the area by reading all kinds of the summarising material, especially books, review articles and research notes.

We start with the focus on the adaptive biology, generation of forms, genetics, and systems biology. The future will show which directions to expand the reading club to, for example, the first candidates for such an expansion are neuroscience and cognition. This strongly depends on the authors' background, which is currently biophysics, engineering, systems biology, biostatistics. However, this can be further developed by either our personal self-education or experience of the new authors (welcome!).

Our approach can be characterised as skeptical empiricism with strong emphasis on real data and being as distant from the speculations, extrapolations, and prejudice as possible. We believe that these topics are too important to give up on them by following certain interpretations based on the old data. The fresh look is always preferable.