Contains information on the molecular organization of the chromosome. This book is suitable for those in the biotechnological industry.

When examined carefully at the molecular level, the chromosome turns out to have created its own private world full of tricks, back door exits and novel solutions. This “folly” makes it an untamed innovator. Geneticists have been bewildered for decades. What kind of creature was actually the chromosome? Was it plastic, changing by innumerous rearrangements and mutations all the time; or was it a rigid structure which has preserved its basic organisation and functions since the dawn of the cell? It is this conflicting state that seems to be at the base of its “folly”. Perplexed by this behavior, cell biologists have called it a junkyard and even the ultimate parasite. Moreover, the chromosome has been regarded as a passive cell organelle prone to random mutations and subjected to the mercy of selection.The latest molecular information discloses a radically different picture in which the chromosome appears as an independent molecular structure that follows its own path. It does not obey gravity, randomness, selection or magnetism.By anchoring the chromosome's contradictory behavior on molecular processes directed by atomic self-assembly, Lima-de-Faria expands a novel view of the chromosome with unexpected implications for genetics, evolution and physics.This timely book contains the latest information on the molecular organization of the chromosome. The information is original and is presented in an unorthodox way, while carefully chosen elucidating and attractive figures serve to add clarity to the subject treated. Thus, the book will add greatly to the general debate on the evolution of living organisms, and will be of particular interest to those in the biotechnological field.

By focusing on chromosomes, Heredity under the Microscope offers a new history of postwar human genetics. Today chromosomes are understood as macromolecular assemblies and are analyzed with a variety of molecular techniques. Yet for much of the twentieth century, researchers studied chromosomes by looking through a microscope. Unlike any other technique, chromosome analysis offered a direct glimpse of the complete human genome, opening up seemingly endless possibilities for observation and intervention. Critics, however, countered that visual evidence was not enough and pointed to the need to understand the molecular mechanisms. Telling this history in full for the first time, Soraya de Chadarevian argues that the often bewildering variety of observations made under the microscope were central to the study of human genetics. Making space for microscope-based practices alongside molecular approaches, de Chadarevian analyzes the close connections between genetics and an array of scientific, medical, ethical, legal, and policy concerns in the atomic age. By exploring the visual evidence provided by chromosome research in the context of postwar biology and medicine, Heredity under the Microscope sheds new light on the cultural history of the human genome.

After having read this book you will never see birds in the same way again. The unexpected patterns displayed by a bird’s body have been seen as bizarre events that demanded little attention or were described as ‘amazing curiosities’. None of these surprising features seem to be fortuitous. They appear to be an integral part of a rigid order and a coherent geometry, which is directed by simple gene interactions and molecular cascades occurring at various cellular levels, and at different times, during the organism’s development. A novel geometry unfolds in front of your eyes, giving the body configurations another meaning. Lima-de-Faria is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Cytogenetics at Lund University, Lund, Sweden. This is his sixth book dealing with the molecular organization of the chromosome and its implications for the understanding of the mechanisms responsible for biological evolution.

A new theory of evolution begins to emerge in the pages of The Altenberg 16: An Expos of the Evolution Industry. Written by Suzan Mazur--a print and television journalist whose reports have appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Archaeology, Omni, and many other publications--the book is a front row seat to the thinking of the great evolutionary science minds of our time about the need to reformulate the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. We hear from world renowned scientists such as Richard Lewontin, Lynn Margulis, Niles Eldredge, Richard Dawkins, the "evo-devo" revolutionaries, NASA astrobiologists, and others. The book grew out of a story Mazur broke online in March 2008--titled "Altenberg The Woodstock of Evolution?"--about the now famous meeting at Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria in July 2008, where 16 scientists discussed expanding evolutionary thinking beyond outdated hypotheses. (MIT will publish the proceedings in April 2010.) Science magazine noted that Mazur's reporting "reverberated throughout the evolutionary biology community." Mazur says she was punished for getting out in front of the story and banned from the symposium but realized the story was bigger than Altenberg (which covered events beginning 500 million years ago) and spoke to scientists who were not invited, including those investigating pre-biotic evolution. She came to the conclusion that evolutionary science suffers because many in the scientific establishment refuse to acknowledge that the old science has served its purpose and there is disagreement about what the new evolution paradigm is. She thinks the dam is now breaking because the public (who funds science) has become a party to the discourse via the Internet and seeks answers to fundamental questions about evolution that scientists so far can't definitively answer.

The Triumph of the Necrophiles is the product of over forty years of research and is the most thorough, comprehensive, and penetrating critique of the mechanical worldview ever written. Modrow meticulously traces the prescientific sources of that worldview back to our Judeo-Christian heritage and to the metaphysics of Plato and Pythagoras. He documents that Plato was in fact a necrophile and that his metaphysics can best be understood as a sublimation of his necrophilia. He discusses the influence that Plato and Pythagoras had on Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. He especially emphasizes how the necrophilic worldview of Plato essentially became the worldview of Galileo, Descartes, and other seventeenth- century thinkers. He also discusses how Newton’s worldview was shaped by his religious beliefs. Modrow contends that the mechanical worldview is totally at odds with every major scientific advance that has occurred since the mid nineteenth century. He painstakingly explains how and why these scientific advances discredit that worldview. He discusses the philosophical implications of the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, Bell’s theorem, and Godel’s proof and presents an alternative worldview that is more consistent with current scientific knowledge. In a final chilling chapter, Modrow shows where the necrophilic worldview of Plato and his modern mechanistic followers are taking us.

New concepts arise in science when apparently unrelated fields of knowledge are put together in a coherent way. The recent results in molecular biology allow to explain the emergence of body patterns in animals that before could not be understood by zoologists. There are no ”fancy curiosities” in nature. Every pattern is a product of a molecular cascade originating in genes and a living organism arises from the collaboration of these genes with the outer physical environment. Tropical fishes are as startling in their colors and geometric circles as peacocks. Tortoises are covered with the most regular triangles, squares and concentric circles that can be green, brown or yellow. Parallel scarlet bands are placed side by side of black ones along the body of snakes. Zebras and giraffes have patterns which are lessons in geometry, with their transversal and longitudinal stripes, their circles and other geometric figures. Monkeys, like the mandrills, have a spectacularly colored face scarlet nose with blue parallel flanges and yellow beard. All this geometry turns out to be highly molecular. The genes are many and have been DNA sequenced. Besides they not only deal with the coloration of the body but with the development of the brain and the embryonic process. A precise scenario of molecular events unravels in the vertebrates. It may seem far-fetched, but the search for the origin of this geometry made it mandatory to study the evolution of matter and the origin of the brain. It turned out that matter from its onset is pervaded by geometry and that the brain is also a prisoner of this ordered construction. Moreover, the brain is capable of altering the body geometry and the geometry of the environment changes the brain. Nothing spectacular occurred when the brain arrived in evolution. Not only it came after the eye, which had already established itself long ago, but it had a modest origin. It started from sensory cells on the skin that later aggregated into clusters of neurons that formed ganglia. It also became evident that pigment cells, that decide the establishment of the body pattern, originate from the same cell population as neurons (the neural crest cells). This is a most revealing result because it throws light on the power that the brain has to rapidly redirect the coloration of the body and to change its pattern. Recent experiments demonstrate how the brain changes the body geometry at will and within seconds, an event that could be hardly conceived earlier. Moreover, this change is not accidental it is related to the surrounding environment and is also used as a mating strategy. Chameleons know how to do it as well as flat fishes and octopuses. No one would have dared to think that the brain had its own geometry. How could the external geometry of solids or other figures of our environment be apprehended by neurons if these had no architecture of their own? Astonishing was that the so called ”simple cells”, in the neurons of the primary visual cortex, responded to a bar of light with an axis of orientation that corresponded to the axis of the cell’s receptive field. We tend to consider our brain a reliable organ. But how reliable is it? From the beginning the brain is obliged to transform reality. Brain imagery involves: form, color, motion and sleep. Unintentionally these results led to unexpected philosophical implications. Plato’s pivotal concept that ”forms” exist independently of the material world is reversed. Atoms have been considered to be imaginary for 2,000 years but at present they can be photographed, one by one, with electron microscopes. The reason why geometry has led the way in this inquiry is due to the fact that where there is geometry there is utter simplicity coupled to rigorous order that underlies the phenomenon where it is recognized. Order allows variation but imposes at the same time a canalization that is patent in what we call evolution.