The Origins of Stability

摘要

In the last few months, five airliners have crashed in various places around the world, apparently due to unrelated failures. On reflection, this is not so surprising—considering the amount of time that I spend sitting on tarmacs waiting for cockpit warning lights to be heeded. Manifold failures must be occurring frequently, so I assume that engineers have built in fail-safe mechanisms that allow planes to cope with them. So too must organisms be robust to genetic and environmental perturbations. Only instead of having been designed to be robust, they have evolved that way. In Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems, Andreas Wagner synthesizes the mechanisms and consequences of such biological buffering. The book, a volume in the Princeton Studies in Complexity series, is sure to lay the foundation for growth of research in this underappreciated field of study.