Springer Evolution Seen from the Phase Diagram of Life (Evolutionary Studies)

This book aims to understand biological evolution through a physical approach, focusing on the macroscopic aspects of the biological genome. Readers will discover the connection between genomic information and the harmony of biological systems, a relationship that remains elusive to many researchers in biological sciences. The most common approach to understanding living organisms with physics is to begin with a single molecule of an organism. In contrast to this bottom-up approach, building from each molecule to the whole, this book takes a coarse-grained approach at the amino acid level to physically understand the macroscopic aspects of the organism. The book presents a system developed by the authors to predict membrane proteins with high accuracy using only physical parameters. Another distinctive perspective of this book is that it proposes the idea of a physical mechanism, other than natural selection, that orchestrates the emergence of order from random processes.The study of macroscopic aspects of living organisms based on this concept has parallels with thermostatistical mechanics for states of matter. Just as random processes create order in matter, there are physical random processes that form order in living organisms. This analogy is the central theme of the book. Using terms and analogies familiar to physicists, the book bridges the gap between biological and physical sciences. The book focuses on simple principles and is aimed primarily at researchers. While the content of this book is at the boundary area of biophysics, soft matter physics and bioinformatics, it will also be of interest to researchers and graduate students working on any biological topics.