Genomes evolve, but how?

摘要

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution," said the great geneticist and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. Twenty-five years on, genomics as a discipline has yet to embrace evolution fully. Michael Lynch is an exception. His timely textbook demands that population thinking, population genetics and evolutionary theory be meshed more explicitly. After all, genomes did not appear suddenly from nowhere, and mutational changes from single base-pair substitutions to whole-genome duplications are at least one basis of molecular as well as pheno-typic evolutionary change.