Digital Evolution 英文参考文献.docVIP

Traditional investigations, based on molecular biology and palaeontology, have yielded much evidence about the incremental evolution of the eye or the brain, for instance. But continuing ignorance about many developmental processes and the absence of key fossil records mean that accounts without missing links, to endorse the theory, may never be realised. Which is what tempted Lenski and Adami to examine the challenge in their virtual world. This is a world where timescales contract and, above all, where other constraints of ‘wet’ biology have no place. ‘It’s not just the speed, by any means’, says Lenski. ‘It’s also the power to manipulate almost any variable one can imagine, to measure variables with absolute precision, to store information that then allows one to trace back a complex chain of events, and to take evolved organisms and subject them to new sorts of analyses that one might not even have anticipated when ?rst collecting the data’. It is a place where virtue is made of simplicity. ‘The worlds we’re dealing with here are extraordinarily simple compared with the real world’, says Adami. ‘Any of the biochemistry associated with transcription and translation, for example, anything more complex than relatively short viral types of genomes, that’s out of our league’, he notes. ‘We can’t see transcription and translation because we don’t have transcription and translationwe go right from sequence to function’. But the principles of evolutionary theory make such restrictions unimportant, he says. ‘Many of the [theory’s] predictions don’t depend on these little details of molecular biology’, notes Adami. ‘The principles are very, very general, and very simple, and in the end they are mostly responsible for the overall dynamics that you see in these simple systems’. Lenski goes further. These virtual realities, he says, ‘offer us a window into an alternative world, and perhaps even a part of the future of our own, where the fundamental evolutionary mechanisms of