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"Many fields of science and engineering have come against the problem of complex design. This occurs when the details become so numerous that computer power alone cannot make progress. For neural networks (aka deep learning), this is known as the NP-completeness problem whereby the amount of computation needed to compute network weights grows in a non-polynomial (i.e. exponential) way as the number of weights increases. For systems biology, it happens when there are too many cell-model parameters to allow for successful estimation. For many engineering fields, it happens when the designs become so complex that integrated testing cannot eliminate faults. Nature solved this complex-design problem using evolution. But exactly how it solved it has been a mystery. Both laboratory experiments and computer-simulation attempts eventually stopped evolving. Something more than Darwin's ideas of heredity, variation, and selection was needed. The solution is that there is a fourth element to evolution and that is ecological change. What happens is that a new variation that is selected can change the ecology and the new ecology can create new opportunities for even more new variations to be selected. By this endless cycle, complexity can grow automatically. This book uses the physics of resource flow to describe in detail how that happens and that knowledge can be used to help overcome the problem of complex design. This book is a monograph that can be used as a textbook on how physics plays a strong role in evolution. The key starting ideas are the flow of energy-and-matter resources, organisms making copies of themselves, and ecological change. From these ideas, quantitative models are developed for many evolutionary processes. Such models include that for selection, multicellularity, coevolution, sexual reproduction, and the Serengeti Rules. Numerous examples of biological phenomena are shown to be in conceptual agreement with the models. In the end, the physics shows how complex design can arise automatically"-- Provided by publisher.

Evolution (Biology) --- Variation (Biology)

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In the nineteenth century and beyond, scientists at Cambridge produced some of the most significant developments in the study of biological variation and inheritance. The work of William Bateson (several of whose books are also reissued in this series) was especially important in this regard. This book, first published in 1906 by the botanist Robert Heath Lock (1879-1915), lucidly traces these and other milestones in modern biological understanding. A readable account is given of the evolution of the discipline since the publication of Darwin's On the Origins of Species in 1859, taking in the biometrical contributions of Francis Galton and the research into mutation conducted by Hugo de Vries. The pioneering experiments of Gregor Mendel, and the more recent rediscovery of his laws of inheritance, are clearly contextualised so that non-specialist readers can appreciate the scientific progress that had been made in the half-century prior to the book's first publication.

Variation (Biology) --- Evolution --- Heredity. --- History.

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It is widely believed that reproductive cycles are very similar between human females. However, there are in fact considerable variations both between individuals and within the reproductive life of any given individual. 'Normal' reproductive cycles cover a wide range of eventualities, and the likelihood of successful monthly egg release and ensuing pregnancy can be modified by a large number of factors. In this book, the variability of human fertility is examined by first looking at the physiological processes regulating reproduction, and the roles of metabolic adaptation and metabolic load. Inter-population variation in normal ovarian function is then discussed, covering the importance of factors such as age, disease and breastfeeding in modifying ovarian function. First published in 1996, this is an important book for all those interested in human fertility.

Fertility, Human. --- Variation (Biology) --- Medical anthropology.

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Charles Darwin (1809-1882) first published this work in 1868 in two volumes. The book began as an expansion of the first two chapters of On the Origin of Species: 'Variation under Domestication' and 'Variation under Nature', and it developed into one of his largest works; Darwin referred to it as his 'big book'. Volume 1 deals with the variations introduced into species as a result of domestication, through changes in climate, diet, breeding and an absence of predators. He began with an examination of dogs and cats, comparing them with their wild counterparts, and moved on to investigate horses and asses; pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats; domestic rabbits; domestic pigeons; fowl; and finally cultivated plants. The work is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century scientific investigation; it is a key text in the development of Darwin's own thought and of the wider discipline of evolutionary biology.

Variation (Biology) --- Domestic animals. --- Plants, Cultivated.

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Variation (Biology) --- Biological variation --- Biology --- Heredity --- Genetics --- Mutation (Biology)