Molecular Evolutionary Biology

Abstract

Current biology is facing a grand synthesis combining knowledge from three different disciplines: molecular biology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology. The first step in this direction was taken already in the late sixties by the pioneering works of Sol Spiegelman [1] who applied biochemical methods to investigate fundamental questions of evolutionary optimization. About the same time Manfred Eigen [2] conceived a kinetic theory of evolution at the molecular level. Since then the study of the evolution of molecules in laboratory systems has become a research area in its own rights. It contrasted and complemented conventional studies in molecular evolution by adding a dynamical component to the essentially phylogenetic issues of sequence data comparisons as initiated and scolarly developed, for example, by Magaret Dayhoff [3]. Meanwhile experiments with replicating molecules in the test tube have shown that evolution in the sense of Charles Darwin’s principle of variation and selection is no priviledge of cellular life: optimization of properties related to the fitness of replicating molecules is observed readily in vitro with naked ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules in evolution experiments.