As pesquisas sobre o ensino da evolução biológica e as teorias evolutivas dos últimos 30 anos apontam para obstáculos no processo de ensino e aprendizagem, desde a Educação Básica até a Superior, em vários países. Dos diferentes aspectos relevantes sobre a evolução biológica investigados até o presente momento a dissertação visou responder a pergunta: como a evolução biológica e as teorias evolutivas se apresentam na organização dos nove livros didáticos de Biologia avaliados e recomendados pelo Programa Nacional do Livro Didático para o Ensino Médio 2007/2009? Objetivou-se, assim: (1) descrever a estrutura e o padrão de distribuição do conteúdo biológico compartilhado entre os nove livros didáticos de Biologia destinados ao ensino médio avaliados e recomendados pelo PNLEM (2007/2009) destacando a evolução biológica e Teorias Evolutivas; (2) descrever as unidades e/ou capítulos específicos dessas obras didáticas que tratem a evolução biológica e as teorias evolutivas como objeto de estudo; (3) localizar conceitos evolutivos pré-determinados ao longo de todas as obras didáticas amostradas de forma a identificar o padrão de distribuição dos assuntos que associem diretamente à evolução biológica. Para a execução do trabalho o quadro metodológico baseou-se na pesquisa qualitativa com as seguintes etapas: (1) levantamento do nome das unidades...

Systems biology is a rapidly expanding field that integrates diverse areas of science such as physics, engineering, computer science, mathematics, and biology toward the goal of elucidating the underlying principles of hierarchical metabolic and regulatory systems in the cell, and ultimately leading to predictive understanding of cellular response to perturbations. Because post-genomics research is taking place throughout the tree of life, comparative approaches offer a way for combining data from many organisms to shed light on the evolution and function of biological networks from the gene to the organismal level. Therefore, systems biology can build on decades of theoretical work in evolutionary biology, and at the same time evolutionary biology can use the systems biology approach to go in new uncharted directions. In this study, we present a review of how the post-genomics era is adopting comparative approaches and dynamic system methods to understand the underlying design principles of network evolution and to shape the nascent field of evolutionary systems biology. Finally, the application of evolutionary systems biology to robust biological network designs is also discussed from the synthetic biology perspective.

Arabidopsis thaliana is now widely used as a model system in molecular and developmental biology, as well as in physiology and cell biology. However, ecologists and evolutionary biologists have turned their attention to the mouse ear cress only much more recently and almost reluctantly. The reason for this is the perception that A. thaliana is not particularly interesting ecologically and that it represents an oddity from an evolutionary standpoint. While there is some truth in both these attitudes, similar criticisms apply to other model systems such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which has been extensively studied from an organismal perspective. Furthermore, the shortcomings of A. thaliana in terms of its restricted ecological niche are counterbalanced by the wealth of information on the molecular and developmental biology of this species, which makes possible to address evolutionary questions that can rarely be pursued in other species. This chapter reviews the history of the use of A. thaliana in organismal biology and discusses some of the recent work and future perspectives of research on a variety of field including life history evolution, phenotypic plasticity, natural selection and quantitative genetics. I suggest that the future of both molecular and especially organismal biology lies into expanding our knowledge from limited and idiosyncratic model systems to their phylogenetic neighborhood...

Evolutionary biology is an essential basic science for medicine, but few doctors and medical researchers are familiar with its most relevant principles. Most medical schools have geneticists who understand evolution, but few have even one evolutionary biologist to suggest other possible applications. The canyon between evolutionary biology and medicine is wide. The question is whether they offer each other enough to make bridge building worthwhile. What benefits could be expected if evolution were brought fully to bear on the problems of medicine? How would studying medical problems advance evolutionary research? Do doctors need to learn evolution, or is it valuable mainly for researchers? What practical steps will promote the application of evolutionary biology in the areas of medicine where it offers the most? To address these questions, we review current and potential applications of evolutionary biology to medicine and public health. Some evolutionary technologies, such as population genetics, serial transfer production of live vaccines, and phylogenetic analysis, have been widely applied. Other areas, such as infectious disease and aging research, illustrate the dramatic recent progress made possible by evolutionary insights. In still other areas...

An appreciation of the fundamental principles of evolutionary biology provides new insights into major diseases and enables an integrated understanding of human biology and medicine. However, there is a lack of awareness of their importance amongst physicians, medical researchers, and educators, all of whom tend to focus on the mechanistic (proximate) basis for disease, excluding consideration of evolutionary (ultimate) reasons. The key principles of evolutionary medicine are that selection acts on fitness, not health or longevity; that our evolutionary history does not cause disease, but rather impacts on our risk of disease in particular environments; and that we are now living in novel environments compared to those in which we evolved. We consider these evolutionary principles in conjunction with population genetics and describe several pathways by which evolutionary processes can affect disease risk. These perspectives provide a more cohesive framework for gaining insights into the determinants of health and disease. Coupled with complementary insights offered by advances in genomic, epigenetic, and developmental biology research, evolutionary perspectives offer an important addition to understanding disease. Further, there are a number of aspects of evolutionary medicine that can add considerably to studies in other domains of contemporary evolutionary studies.

All aspects of biological diversification ultimately trace to evolutionary modifications at the cellular level. This central role of cells frames the basic questions as to how cells work and how cells come to be the way they are. Although these two lines of inquiry lie respectively within the traditional provenance of cell biology and evolutionary biology, a comprehensive synthesis of evolutionary and cell-biological thinking is lacking. We define evolutionary cell biology as the fusion of these two eponymous fields with the theoretical and quantitative branches of biochemistry, biophysics, and population genetics. The key goals are to develop a mechanistic understanding of general evolutionary processes, while specifically infusing cell biology with an evolutionary perspective. The full development of this interdisciplinary field has the potential to solve numerous problems in diverse areas of biology, including the degree to which selection, effectively neutral processes, historical contingencies, and/or constraints at the chemical and biophysical levels dictate patterns of variation for intracellular features. These problems can now be examined at both the within- and among-species levels, with single-cell methodologies even allowing quantification of variation within genotypes. Some results from this emerging field have already had a substantial impact on cell biology...

Understanding development is relevant to understanding evolution because developmental processes structure the expression of phenotypic variation upon which natural selection acts. Advances in developmental biology are fueling a new synthesis of developmental and evolutionary biology, but it remains unclear how to use developmental information that largely derives from a few model organisms to test hypotheses about the evolutionary developmental biology of taxa such as humans and other primates that have not been or are not amenable to direct study through experimental developmental biology. In this article, we discuss how and when model organisms like mice are useful for studying the evolutionary developmental biology of even rather distantly related and morphologically different groups like primates. A productive approach is to focus on processes that are likely to play key roles in producing evolutionarily significant phenotypic variation across a large phylogenetic range. We illustrate this approach by applying the analysis of craniofacial variation in mouse mutant models to primate and human evolution.; Anthropology

In bacteria and archaea, viruses are the primary infectious agents, acting as virulent, often deadly pathogens. A form of adaptive immune defense known as CRISPR-Cas enables microbial cells to acquire immunity to viral pathogens by recognizing specific sequences encoded in viral genomes. The unique biology of this system results in evolutionary dynamics of host and viral diversity that cannot be fully explained by the traditional models used to describe microbe-virus coevolutionary dynamics. Here, we show how the CRISPR-mediated adaptive immune response of hosts to invading viruses facilitates the emergence of an evolutionary mode we call distributed immunity - the coexistence of multiple, equally-fit immune alleles among individuals in a microbial population. We use an eco-evolutionary modeling framework to quantify distributed immunity and demonstrate how it emerges and fluctuates in multi-strain communities of hosts and viruses as a consequence of CRISPR-induced coevolution under conditions of low viral mutation and high relative numbers of viral protospacers. We demonstrate that distributed immunity promotes sustained diversity and stability in host communities and decreased viral population density that can lead to viral extinction. We analyze sequence diversity of experimentally coevolving populations of Streptococcus thermophilus and their viruses where CRISPR-Cas is active...

Whole-genome duplication (WGD), which leads to polyploidy, has been implicated in speciation and biological novelty. In plants, many species have experienced historical bouts of WGD or exhibit extant ploidy variation, which is likely representative of an early stage in the evolution of new polyploid lineages. To elucidate the evolutionary dynamics of autopolyploids and species with multiple ploidy levels, I develop population genetic theory in Chapter 2 that I use in Chapter 4 to extract information about the evolutionary history of Arabidopsis arenosa, a European wildflower that has diploid and autotetraploid populations. Chapter 3 involves a separate project exploring the ascertainment bias in restriction site associated DNA sequencing (RADseq). In Chapter 2, I develop coalescent models for autotetraploid species with tetrasomic inheritance and show that the ancestral genetic process in a large population without recombination may be approximated using Kingman’s standard coalescent, with a coalescent effective population size 4N. Using this result, I was able to use existing coalescent simulation programs to show in Chapter 4 that, in A. arenosa, a widespread autotetraploid race arose from a single ancestral population. This autopolyploidization event was not accompanied by immediate reproductive isolation between diploids and tetraploids in this species...

For almost a century, evolutionary economics has been based to a significant extent on analogies derived from biology. At the same time the discipline suffered from lack of analytical rigor. Recently, advances in thermodynamics and information theory have provided a new foundation for evolutionary studies in biology and economics alike. As a result, the body of studies in evolutionary economics that imports concepts from thermodynamics and information theory to develop new analogies is growing. This paper surveys recent trends in evolutionary economics at the crossroads of biology and physics, and argues to supplant analogies derived from either of the two disciplines. Albeit powerful means to crystallize thought about evolutionary processes in economic systems, analogies from biology have tended to plaster over the many differences between biological and economic processes that are essential to economic systems. Similarly, thermodynamics and information theory cannot provide a non-anthropocentric evaluation of economic processes. Yet, the concepts and measures available from physics can be used to improve our understanding of economic evolution if properly placed into the context of socioeconomic processes. The paper delineates the realm for non-analogy based applications of concepts from physics for the assessment of economic processes in light of discontinuities and emergent complexities.; no

The scientific study of evolution in Chile has experienced periods of diversification and stasis, depending upon the social and political context at different times. In the eighteenth century, most of the natural history research consisted of systematics and taxonomy and, as in most of South America, this task was performed mainly by natural historian theologists. Later, the immigration of European scientists to Chile after independence from Spain in 1810 improved substantially its knowledge of the local biota and stimulated the diversification of naturalists in the country. Research in modern biology and the teaching of genetics in Chile can be traced back to Giovanni Noe, an Italian zoologist who had a profound impact in the first third of the twentieth century. In the 1960s–70s, Danko Brncic, a population geneticist educated in the tradition of Dobzhansky and the modern synthesis, led the most important diversification process in the study of evolutionary biology in the country. However, the military coup in 1973 brought this radiation to a sudden stop and produced a stasis period associated with the subsequent 17-year dictatorship. Evolutionary biology recovered its status after the re-establishment of democracy...

Protein interaction networks aim to summarize the complex interplay of proteins in an organism. Early studies suggested that the position of a protein in the network determines its evolutionary rate but there has been considerable disagreement as to what extent other factors, such as protein abundance, modify this reported dependence. We compare the genomes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Caenorhabditis elegans with those of closely related species to elucidate the recent evolutionary history of their respective protein interaction networks. Interaction and expression data are studied in the light of a detailed phylogenetic analysis. The underlying network structure is incorporated explicitly into the statistical analysis. The increased phylogenetic resolution, paired with high-quality interaction data, allows us to resolve the way in which protein interaction network structure and abundance of proteins affect the evolutionary rate. We find that expression levels are better predictors of the evolutionary rate than a protein's connectivity. Detailed analysis of the two organisms also shows that the evolutionary rates of interacting proteins are not sufficiently similar to be mutually predictive. It appears that meaningful inferences about the evolution of protein interaction networks require comparative analysis of reasonably closely related species. The signature of protein evolution is shaped by a protein's abundance in the organism and its function and the biological process it is involved in. Its position in the interaction networks and its connectivity may modulate this but they appear to have only minor influence on a protein's evolutionary rate.; Comment: Accepted for publication in BMC Evolutionary Biology

In the present article the recent works to formulate laws in Darwinian evolutionary dynamics are discussed. Although there is a strong consensus that general laws in biology may exist, opinions opposing such suggestion are abundant. Based on recent progress in both mathematics and biology, another attempt to address this issue is made in the present article. Specifically, three laws which form a mathematical framework for the evolutionary dynamics in biology are postulated. The second law is most quantitative and is explicitly expressed in the unique form of a stochastic differential equation. Salient features of Darwinian evolutionary dynamics are captured by this law: the probabilistic nature of evolution, ascendancy, and the adaptive landscape. Four dynamical elements are introduced in this formulation: the ascendant matrix, the transverse matrix, the Wright evolutionary potential, and the stochastic drive. The first law may be regarded as a special case of the second law. It gives the reference point to discuss the evolutionary dynamics. The third law describes the relationship between the focused level of description to its lower and higher ones, and defines the dichotomy of deterministic and stochastic drives. It is an acknowledgement of the hierarchical structure in biology. A new interpretation of Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection is provided in terms of the F-Theorem. The proposed laws are based on continuous representation in both time and population. Their generic nature is demonstrated through their equivalence to classical formulations. The present three laws appear to provide a coherent framework for the further development of the subject.; Comment: 61 pages...

This is a review of William Feller's important contributions to mathematical biology. The seminal paper [Feller1951] "Diffusion processes in genetics" was particularly influential on the development of stochastic processes at the interface to evolutionary biology, and interesting ideas in this direction (including a first characterization of what is nowadays known as "Feller's branching diffusion") already shaped up in the paper [Feller 1939] (written in German) "The foundations of a probabistic treatment of Volterra's theory of the struggle for life". Feller's article "On fitness and the cost of natural selection" [Feller 1967] contains a critical analysis of the concept of "genetic load".; Comment: The present article will appear in: Schilling, R.L., Vondracek, Z., Woyczynski, W.A.: The Selected Papers of William Feller. Springer Verlag

Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has been recently established and may be critical to understanding how populations adapt to changing environments. In this paper we examine the relationship between ecological and evolutionary dynamics, focusing on a well-studied experimental aquatic predator-prey system (Fussmann et al. 2000; Shertzer et al. 2002; Yoshida et al. 2003). Major properties of predator-prey cycles in this system are determined by ongoing evolutionary dynamics in the prey population. Under some conditions, however, the populations tend to apparently stable steady-state densities. These are the subject of the present paper. We examine a previously developed model for the system, to determine how evolution shapes properties of the equilibria, in particular the number and identity of coexisting prey genotypes. We then apply these results to explore how evolutionary dynamics can shape the responses of the system to "management": externally imposed alterations in conditions. Specifically, we compare the behavior of the system including evolutionary dynamics...

Ready access to data is a key concern in both basic research and problem-solving in the biological sciences, as the scale and scope of the questions that researchers ask expand, and as global problems demand data collected from around the world. With a grant from the National Science Foundation, from 2004 through 2009, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) has led a series of five workshops on data sharing, to help the ecology, evolution, and organismal biology communities find common ground on how to make data more readily discoverable and accessible in their own disciplines. The most recent of these focused in the development of incentives for data sharing, both at the individual and organizational level. This presentation will summarize the workshop recommendations, with a focus on preservation, curation, and access to data; access to analytical and visualization tools; and the need to make data archiving simple and routine. The roles of funders and publishers of research are also key and will be highlighted. *Background/Question/Methods* Ready access to data is a key concern in both basic research and problem-solving in the biological sciences, as the scale and scope of the questions that researchers ask expand...

The genetic code is redundant as amino acids are encoded by synonymous codons that are unequally used.This codon usage bias (CUB) affects gene expression and cellular functions yet the underlying mechanisms have not been elucidated. We used a sequence-specific, stoichiometric model of metabolism and macromolecular synthesis for Escherichia coli K12 MG1655 to test the effect of randomly changed CUB on growth maximization under various environmental conditions. Amongst CUB mutant strains, we identified reduced growth phenotypes, which were caused by tRNA supply shortage. We propose, supported by computations and bibliomic data, that expansion of tRNA gene content or tRNA reading is a mechanism to respond to changes in CUB. Our systems biology modelling framework suggests that in order to maximize growth and to adapt to new environmental niches, CUB and tRNA content must co-evolve and provides further evidence for the mutation-selection-drift balance theory of CUB.

Metabolic-repair models, or (M,R)-systems were introduced in Relational Biology by Robert Rosen. Subsequently, Rosen represented such (M,R)-systems (or simply MRs)in terms of categories of sets, deliberately selected without any structure other than the discrete topology of sets. Theoreticians of life's origins postulated that Life on Earth has begun with the simplest possible organism, called the primordial. Mathematicians interested in biology attempted to answer this important question of the minimal living organism by defining the functional relations that would have made life possible in such a minimal system- a grandad and grandma of all living organisms on Earth.

A four year old child devotes half their total energy expenditure (TEE) to their brains. Even by 10 years-of-age it is still 30% (compared to an adult’s ≈12%). This extreme energy use results from a high brain/body size ratio – combined with a doubling of cerebral gray matter energy utilization (due to synaptic exuberance during cognitive neuromaturation). With extreme energy expenditure goes extreme vulnerability to hypoglycemia: (1) children become hypoglycemic after 24-36 hours of fast (compared to 60-72 hours in adults), and (2) their brains suffer neurological impairment (shown in disrupted P300 potentials) at a lower decrease in plasma glucose: 3.6 - 4.2 mmol L-1 in children rather than < 3.0 mmol L-1 in adults (against a normal level in both of 4.6-4.8 mmol L-1). Human biology has selected adaptations that buffer and protect children from this energy lability. A physiological one is that energy metabolism in skeletal muscles is biased towards using fatty acids, and this minimizes uptake competition of plasma glucose between muscles and the brain. Behavioral adaptations (in human hunter-gatherers) include adults cooperatively pooling high energy foods with juveniles for ≈15 years...