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."

Next, a note on the audience preferences is made. Namely, as book introduces the new perspective the evolutionary science must hold upon, the author feels obligated to go into technical details of some studies providing for empirical evidence. On the other hand, non-professional readers feel passion for the subject as well. In this situation there is a demand to explain how to read the book for people with different backgrounds. The book even has the "Suggested Readings" list for the non-professionals, so the author cared about everybody. Importantly, there are two online resources used to summarize the technical information with appropriate references to the original studies: the author's own webpage and the book's website. We are happy to redirect the reader to these resources as well, should he/she need the details.
The Introduction section revises some basics of evolution in the light of the new century achievements and the rest of the book consists of Four parts.
The first part introduces some aspects of the nonlinear decision-making mechanism of a cell, which is based on the ability of the cell to sense the environmental inputs and transmit the signals (signalling).
Part II seeks to defend the thesis "Genome is a Read-Write storage system", using the analogy of the informational era. This part, as claimed by the author, is the most hard to read for the non-professionals. For the professionals, this is considered as a review of the Read-Write concept of genome as the author could not find any of the kind.
Part III summarizes the evolutionary lessons from the molecular genetics and genome sequencing.
Finally, Part IV concludes the book with a "new conceptual basis for evolutionary research in the 21st century".