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Bioengineering and Ethics
Published in Howard Winet, Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists, 2021
With the discovery of Gregor Mendel’s 1866 paper in 1900, a mechanism for transmitting Darwin’s “variations” was finally in place. By 1903, microscopic techniques developed since 1866 helped reveal chromosomes, and the “gene” was named in 1909 (Millar et al. 1996). The Neo-Darwinism era had begun. It was concluded that it was the “natural selection” of this structure by the environment that drove biological evolution. When examined at the level of whole societies, population genetics could be applied to evolution. Natural selection began to be seen as a statistical problem in which risk and protective (from disease, etc.) factors had genetic determinants. Variation within a population can be considerable. Accordingly, the only way to conclude that a particular action had to be taken to stop agent A from reaching the population at large was to be “confident” about the correlation between the undesirable effect and agent A. A similar procedure needs to be followed in deciding if society would benefit from administering agent B to the population. Statistical methods for arriving at the required levels of confidence can be quite sophisticated. The techniques of previous statisticians like Galton were “modernized” by Karl Pearson (1857–1936) who developed the chi-square test (Millar et al. 1996). Pearson is considered a founder of 20th-century biological statistics (Millar et al. 1996).
Chemical Hybridization Approaches Applied to Natural and Synthetic Compounds for the Discovery of Drugs Active Against Neglected Tropical Diseases
Published in Venkatesan Jayaprakash, Daniele Castagnolo, Yusuf Özkay, Medicinal Chemistry of Neglected and Tropical Diseases, 2019
Elena Petricci, Paolo Governa, Fabrizio Manetti
During the same years, computer-assisted drug design has made a breakthrough in the process of drug design and discovery. Many papers appeared at that time to describe research projects where dedicated computer softwares were used to increase the efficacy of drug identification steps. Part of these works was aimed at finding new hybrid compounds by merging already known active small molecules, under the assumption that such compounds acted with the same mechanism of action by interactions with the same site on their receptor. As an example, following a classical medicinal chemistry approach, the common pharmacophoric portions of known aldose reductase inhibitors were identified by SAR and merged together into new hybrid inhibitors which were further optimized by a molecular simplification approach (Butera et al. 1989). Computational resources were also applied to build hybrid compounds by combining or shuffling the building blocks of two or more known compounds into libraries of first generation daughter molecules. These methods were based on the attempt to convert biological evolution into chemical evolution and are known as genetic algorithms or drug evolution (Lazar et al. 2004).
Molecular Analysis of Plant DNA Genomes: Conserved and Diverged DNA Sequences
Published in S. K. Dutta, DNA Systematics, 2019
The discovery of the genetic role of DNA has set the stage for studying the structure and evolution of genomes as a means of improving and further elaborating the systematics and the theories of biological evolution. Originally, microorganisms were the target of this research; but since the early 1960s (and especially after the DNA hybridization technique had been developed), eukaryotic taxa were likewise taken up. Recently, genetic engineering and nucleic acid sequencing have opened up new opportunities in this field.
Study of mutation from DNA to biological evolution
Published in International Journal of Radiation Biology, 2019
Masako Bando, Tetsuhiro Kinugawa, Yuichiro Manabe, Miwako Masugi, Hiroo Nakajima, Kazuyo Suzuki, Yuichi Tsunoyama, Takahiro Wada, Hiroshi Toki
Finally, we would like to mention an amazing numerical consistency between the cell-level evolutionary changes and polymorphisms within various species. Such an approach was first proposed by Kimura (1968) by investigating the DNA sequence of the amino acid and by counting the mutant substitutions. This approach made a remarkable breakthrough in the sense that it bridges the mutation of cells occurring in the 10 μm scale world and the theory of biological evolution in the world of the scale of billion years. This fact encourages us to proceed further to arrive at the concept of so-called molecular clock or evolutionary clock. This provides us a tool to connect the phylogenetic events to spontaneous mutation frequency and to estimate the time interval of phylogenetic events. Especially much progress has been made in DNA-sequencing technologies, the usage of the idea ‘molecular clock’ has become more valuable and access the development of theories of molecular evolution (Kumar 2005). Although we have not yet arrived at a complete understanding level on the interplay of the mutation rate, molecular evolution and evolution of living system and molecular clock, it will surely give various hints to solve the question, ‘what is life’ (Kumar and Subramanian 2002).
Recent selection of candidate genes for mammal domestication in Europeans and language change in Europe: a hypothesis
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2021
Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Evgeny Chekalin, Sergey Bruskin, Tatiana Tatarinova, Irina Morozova
Overall, our results suggest that human self-domestication is an ongoing process. Therefore, we can expect that it contributed to past and recent changes in the human body, behaviour, and culture, and seemingly cognition, with a potential impact on language evolution. The selection of different sets of candidates for domestication seems to account for the various stages of the human self-domestication process. Ultimately, we can suggest that domestication and cultural practices are interdependent; they trigger each other during the ongoing cultural and biological evolution of human beings.
Why Socio-Political Beliefs Trump Individual Morality: An Evolutionary Perspective
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2020
That morality originated through a co-evolutionary process of cultural and biological evolution to reap the benefits of cooperation in social dilemma situations has become a well accepted and empirically supported view in the literature (Curry et al. 2019; Veit 2019). However, the picture provided by these accounts has hitherto failed to map onto a large cluster of behavioral phenomena that can be considered the “dark side of morality”—that is, morally-motivated behavior that is harmful and violent.