Poems about US life before and during the Trump presidency, with its alienation, violence, and political despair. In this dystopian landscape, the weak exist to be trodden and those who are trodden are weak.' It is a book about casual racism, sharp-suited Fascism and the complicity of liberals in the assault on equality and justice. Between the nar

This book is concerned with recent advances in fitness landscapes. The concept of fitness landscapes originates from theoretical biology and refers to a framework for analysing and visualizing the relationships between genotypes, phenotypes and fitness. These relationships lay at the centre of attempts to mathematically describe evolutionary processes and evolutionary dynamics. The book addresses recent advances in the understanding of fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology and evolutionary computation. In the volume, experts in the field of fitness landscapes present these findings in an integrated way to make it accessible to a number of audiences: senior undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, theoretical biology, physics, applied mathematics and engineering, but also researcher looking for a reference or/and entry point into using fitness landscapes for analysing algorithms. Also practitioners wanting to employ fitness landscape techniques for evaluating bio- and nature-inspired computing algorithms can find valuable material in the book. For teaching proposes, the book could also be used as a reference handbook.

This book lays out a number of the general issues concerning the structure of rugged fitness landscapes and examines both the history and the current status of experimental work on somatic mutation and the maturation of the immune response.

The workshop "Biologically Inspired Physics" was organized, with the support of the NATO Scientific Affairs Division and the Directorate-General for Science, Research and Development of the Commission of the European Communities, in order to review some subjects of physics of condensed matter which are inspired by biological problems or deal with biological systems, but which address physical questions. The main topics discussed in the meeting were: 1. Macromolecules: In particular, proteins and nucleic acids. Special emphasis was placed on modelling protein folding, where analogies with disordered systems in con densed matter (glasses, spin glasses) were suggested. It is not clear at this point whether such analogies will help in solving the folding problem. Interesting problems in nucleic acids (in particular DNA) deal with the dynamics of semiflexible chains with torsion and the relationship between topology and local structure. They arise from such biological problems as DNA packing or supercoiling. 2. Membranes: This field has witnessed recent progress in the understanding of the statistical mechanics of fluctuating flexible sheets, such as lipid bilayers. It appears that one is close to understanding shape fluctuations in red blood cells on a molec ular basis. Open problems arise from phenomena such as budding or membrane fusion. Experiments on model systems, such as vesicle systems or artificial lipids, have great potential. Phenomena occurring inside the membrane (protein diffusion, ionic pumps) were only discussed briefly.

Authored by one of the world's leading organic chemists, this authoritative reference provides an overview of basic strategies in directed evolution and introduces common gene mutagenesis, screening and selection methods. Throughout the text, emphasis is placed on methodology development to maximize efficiency, reliability and speed of the experiments and to provide guidelines for efficient protein engineering. Professor Reetz highlights the application of directed evolution experiments to address limitations in the field of enzyme selectivity, substrate scope, activity and robustness. He critically reviews recent developments and case studies, takes a look at future applications in the field of organic synthesis, and concludes with lessons learned from previous experiments.