Phenotypes

This book provides a framework for understanding organism design including constraints, trends and major constellations of adaptive tactics. The fundamental organization revolves around organisms as problem solving machines - the key problems and alternative solutions. This text incorporates modern molecular knowledge of the structure and regulation of genes into an evolutionary framework, stressing the importance of genomic integration as a selectable feature in the evolution of multicellular phenotypes. It reinterprets important subjects in the new framework, including transposable elements, epigenetics, the evolution of sex, phenotypic plasticity and the evolution and regulation of longevity assurance systems. This work's vast scope spans the molecular to the ecological, making it relevant to all biologists. It should also interest those designing new organisms genetically, and to those wishing to understand the design of naturally evolved organisms.