Monopode

Dynamic Models in Biology

From controlling disease outbreaks to predicting heart attacks, dynamic models are increasingly crucial for understanding biological processes. Many universities are starting undergraduate programs in computational biology to introduce students to this rapidly growing field. In Dynamic Models in Biology, the first text on dynamic models specifically written for undergraduate students in the biological sciences, ecologist Stephen Ellner and mathematician John Guckenheimer teach students how to understand, build, and use dynamic models in biology. Developed from a course taught by Ellner and Guckenheimer at Cornell University, the book is organized around biological applications, with mathematics and computing developed through case studies at the molecular, cellular, and population levels. The authors cover both simple analytic models--the sort usually found in mathematical biology texts--and the complex computational models now used by both biologists and mathematicians. Linked to a Web site with computer-lab materials and exercises, Dynamic Models in Biology is a major new introduction to dynamic models for students in the biological sciences, mathematics, and engineering.

Struggle of Life

"Life emprisons stress and puts it to work. It often does so by symbiosis. Struggle is a property of life. This book presents Life as a struggle to bring the order of Mendel's Laws of heredity. The physical world tends to run out of useful energy like an old-fashioned clock. The secret of Life is, that it brings order where useful energy has gone, by a process called adaptation. This struggle of life so fashions biodiversity at all levels. Many decades of long-term experiments in test-tubes, long-term study of oceans and climates and forest ecosystem research allowed the authors to compare adaptation of life, from submicroscopic nucleotides to huge ecosystems. The sun's atomic clock beats the rhythm of environmental stress. Behaviour, rhythm and architecture were studied and explained at all levels, from molecule to plant or animal and to ecosystems. All evolution in Life follows pathways of a few steps only, joined by `biological clasps '. A clasp is like a coded biological lock at the end of a chain. A clasp opens or closes each half-path around the DNA helix., A meristem-with-leaf ('leaf-plus') opens or closes the pathway of shoot growth in plants, a ` minimal axis ' allows or blocks branching, perhaps ` homeotic genes ' in animals possess clasps. ` Critical eco-units ' stop or start ecosystem succession. Adaptation to stress requires a change of the code of the lock, that is a changed clasp, and so produces new instructions for new, adapted development. Codes are changed by plasmid transfer in DNA, meristem differentiation in plants, selective activation of seeds and eggs in mini-ecosystems. The sheer number of processes causes development to be complex and fuzzy. The struggle of Life has no mechanical precision. It creates similar but not quite the same, new, unexpected, diverse places for new, diverse structures and organisms to grow."--Site web www.nhbs.com.

OMC 99, Offshore Mediterranean Conference