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Koonin ‘falou e disse’: o Enézio estava certo - vem aí uma nova teoria da evolução
Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on February 12, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkp089
Survey and Summary
Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics
Eugene V. Koonin*National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: 301 496 2477 (Ext 294); Fax: 30 480 9241; Email: koonin@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Received January 9, 2009. Revised January 30, 2009. Accepted February 4, 2009.
Comparative genomics and systems biology offer unprecedented opportunities for testing central tenets of evolutionary biology formulated by Darwin in the Origin of Species in 1859 and expanded in the Modern Synthesis 100 years later. Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forcesthat shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas non-adaptive processes are much more prominent than previously suspected. Major contributions of horizontal gene transfer and diverse selfish genetic elements to genome evolution undermine the Tree of Life concept. An adequate depiction ofevolution requires the more complex concept of a network or ‘forest’ of life. There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non-adaptive consequenceof evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation. Several universals of genome evolution were discovered including the invariant distributions of evolutionary rates among orthologous genes from diverse genomes and of paralogous gene family sizes, and the negative correlation between gene expression level and sequence evolution rate. Simple, non-adaptive models of evolution explain some of these universals, suggesting that a new synthesis of evolutionary biology might become feasible in a not so remote future.
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Tirando o chapéu para Paul Nelson
PDF do artigo gratuito aqui.
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Fui, nem sei por que querendo ver a cara da Galera dos meninos e meninas de Darwin. Será que eles vão ficar epistemicamente traumatizados? Koonin não poderia ter esperado um pouco para publicar este trabalho? Logo depois dos 200 anos de Darwin?
