Download or read book Gene Expression and Its Discontents written by Rodrick Wallace and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gene Expression and Its Discontents written by Rodrick Wallace and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gene Expression and its Discontents examines a class of probability models describing how epigenetic context affects gene expression and organismal development, using the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory in a highly formal manner. Taking classic results on spontaneous symmetry breaking abducted from statistical physics in groupoid, rather than group, circumstances, the work suggests that epigenetic information sources act as analogs to a tunable catalyst, directing development into different characteristic pathways according to the structure of external signals. The results have significant implications for epigenetic epidemiology, in particular for understanding how environmental stressors, in a large sense, can induce a broad spectrum of developmental disorders in humans. The authors then apply the perspective to a number of chronic diseases broadly associated with obesity, using data at different scales of observation.
Download or read book Computational Psychiatry written by Rodrick Wallace and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores mental disorders from a uniquely evolutionary perspective. Although there have been many attempts to mathematically model neural processes and, to some extent, their dysfunction, there is very little literature that models mental function within a sociocultural, socioeconomic, and environmental context. Addressing this gap in the extant literature, this book explores essential aspects of mental disorders, recognizing the ubiquitous role played by the exaptation of crosstalk between cognitive modules at many different scales and levels of organization, the missing heritability of complex diseases, and cultural epigenetics. Further, it introduces readers to valuable control theory tools that permit the exploration of the environmental induction of neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as the study of the synergism between culture, psychopathology and sleep disorders, offering a distinctively unique resource.
Download or read book Cognitive Dynamics on Clausewitz Landscapes written by Rodrick Wallace and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive and evolutionary theories to develop models of conflict between hierarchically-structured cognitive entities under circumstances of imprecision, uncertainty and stress. Characterized as friction and the fog-of-war by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, such conditions impair institutional cognition in real-time conflict and pose a real and continuing threat to organizations, such as the US military. In a linked collection of formal essays and a mathematical appendix, the book explores different aspects of cognitive and evolutionary process as conducted under the direction of doctrine that acts as a kind of genome for retention of what is learned through Lamarckian evolutionary selection pressures: armies and corporate entities learn from conflict, and incorporate that learning into their ongoing procedures. The book proposes models and policy solutions for strategic competence. A central feature of the book is a formal description of the famous OODA loop of the US military theorist John Boyd in terms of the Data Rate Theorem that links control and information theories. That description is expanded to cover more fully the impact of stochastic fog-of-war effects on tactical and operational scales of conflict. Subsequent chapters examine in more detail the role of doctrine, and the particular effect of embedding culture on cognitive and Lamarckian evolutionary processes associated with conflict on tactical, operational, and strategic scales and levels of organization. A scientifically sophisticated exercise in applied mathematics, history, evolutionary theory, and ecosystem theory, this book will be appropriate for researchers and students interested in defense, security, and international relations, as well as non-academic career professionals in government and industry.
Download or read book An Ecosystem Approach to Economic Stabilization written by Rodrick Wallace and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creation of economic institutions that can function well under substantial uncertainties -- Black Swans -- is analogous to the dilemmas confronting our hunter-gatherer forefathers in the face of large-scale ecological unpredictability. The ultimate solution was not the development of a super hunter-gatherer technology that could ride out repeated catastrophe, but rather the invention, in neolithic times, of culturally-adapted 'farmed' ecosystems constructed to maximize food yield and minimize risks of famine. Recent advances in evolutionary and ecosystem theory applied to economic structure and process may permit construction of both new economic theory and new tools for data analysis that can help in the design of more robust economic institutions. This may result in less frequent and less disruptive transitions, and enable the design of culturally-specific systems less affected by those that do occur. This unique and innovative book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive science and evolutionary theory to the problem of the necessary stabilization of economic processes. At the core of this book is the establishment of a statistics-like toolbox for the study of empirical data that is consistent with generalized evolutionary approaches. This toolbox enables the construction of both new economic theories and methods of data analysis that can help in the design of more robust economic institutions. This in turn will result in less frequent and less disruptive Black Swans, and enable as well the design of culturally-specific systems less affected by those that do occur.
Download or read book Essays on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis written by Rodrick Wallace and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the ‘punctuated equilibrium' of Eldrege and Gould, through Lewontin's ‘triple helix' and the various visions and revisions of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) of Laland and others, both data and theory have demanded an opening-up of the 1950's Evolutionary Synthesis that so firmly wedded evolutionary theory to the mathematics of gene frequency analysis. It can, however, be argued that a single deep and comprehensive mathematical theory may simply not be possible for the almost infinite varieties of evolutionary process active at and across the full range of scales of biological, social, institutional, and cultural phenomena. Indeed, the case history of 'meme theory' should have raised a red flag that narrow gene-centered models of evolutionary process may indeed have serious limitations. What is attempted here is less grand, but still broader than a gene-centered analysis. Following the instruction of Maturana and Varela that all living systems are cognitive, in a certain sense, and that living as a process is a process of cognition, the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories that bound all cognition provide a basis for constructing an only modestly deep but wider-ranging series of probability models that might be converted into useful statistical tools for the analysis of observational and experimental data related to evolutionary process. The line of argument in this series of interrelated essays proves to be surprisingly direct.
Download or read book The Mind and Its Discontents written by Grant Gillett and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author argues that to understand mental illness fully requires more than a study of biological models of mental processes and pathologies. He stresses that the causes of human mental disorders are to be found in human interactions.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Biology written by Marjorie Grene and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how the philosophy of biology has evolved to our current understanding.
Download or read book The New Mind Body Science of Depression written by Vladimir Maletic and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scientific and therapeutic implications of a new way of understanding a common disease. Depression has often been studied, but this multifaceted disease remains far from understood. Here, leading researchers present a major new view of the disorder that synthesizes multiple lines of scientific evidence from neurobiology, mindfulness, and genetics. A comprehensive mind-body approach to understanding, evaluating, and treating this disease.
Download or read book Transactions on Computational Systems Biology XI written by Ralph-Johan Back and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This issue on Computational Models for Cell Processes is based on a workshop that took place in Turku, Finland, May 2008. The papers span a mix of approaches to systems biology, ranging from quantitative techniques to computing paradigms inspired by biology.
Download or read book Genetics of Complex Traits Diseases from Under Represented Populations written by Segun Fatumo and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mapping the Future of Biology written by Anouk Barberousse and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carving Nature at its Joints? In order to map the future of biology we need to understand where we are and how we got there. Present day biology is the realization of the famous metaphor of the organism as a bete ˆ machine elaborated by Descartes in Part V of the Discours,a realization far beyond what anyone in the seventeenth century could have im- ined. Until the middle of the nineteenth century that machine was an articulated collection of macroscopic parts, a system of gears and levers moving gasses, solids, and liquids, and causing some parts of the machine to move in response to the force produced by others. Then, in the nineteenth century, two divergent changes occurred in the level at which the living machine came to be investigated. First, with the rise of chemistry and the particulate view of the composition of matter, the forces on macroscopic machine came to be understood as the ma- festation of molecular events, and functional biology became a study of molecular interactions. That is, the machine ceased to be a clock or a water pump and became an articulated network of chemical reactions. Until the ?rst third of the twentieth century this chemical view of life, as re?ected in the development of classical b- chemistry treated the chemistry of biological molecules in much the same way as for any organic chemical reaction, with reaction rates and side products that were the consequence of statistical properties of the concentrations of reactants.
Download or read book Cumulated Index Medicus written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 1516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cytokines as Players of Neuronal Plasticity and Sensitivity to Environment in Healthy and Pathological Brain written by Silvia Alboni and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now accepted that immune molecules are not only present within the brain during pathology but they exert physiological functions in the “healthy” brain as well. Increasing evidence points to a neuro-modulatory role of cytokines and chemokines (CHEMOtactic cytoKINES) in basal transmission and plasticity processes where signaling between peri-synaptic astrocytes, microglia and neurons plays an important role. Nevertheless, the exact mechanisms as to how cytokines, and in particular chemokines, participate in the molecular and cellular processes thought to subserve memory formation, plasticity processes and responsiveness to environmental stimuli remain to be clarified. Interestingly, in in vitro preparations, molecules like TNF-α, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6, CX3CL1, CXCL12, CCL2 and CCL3 are implicated in synaptic formation and scaling, in modulation of glutamatergic transmission, in plasticity and neurogenesis, in particular in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is an extremely plastic structure, one of the main neurogenic niches in the adult brain, that exhibits a marked sensibility to environmental stimuli. Indeed exposure of mice to environmental enrichment (EE) modifies learning and memory abilities increasing neurogenesis and neuronal plasticity whether exposure to severe stressful experiences diminishes neurotrophic support, impairs neurogenesis, plasticity and cognition. In the hippocampus cytokines play a key role in mediating both positive as well as negative effects of the environment affecting neuronal plasticity also in stress related pathologies, such as depression. It has been reported that mice lacking type 1 receptor for IL-1 display impaired hippocampal memory and LTP that are restored by EE; moreover negative effects on neuronal plasticity (and thus behavior) induced by stress exposure can be prevented by blocking IL-1 activity. In addition, mice lacking IL-6 have improved cognitive functions whereas the absence of microglia-driven CX3CR1 signaling increases hippocampal plasticity and spatial memory occluding the potentiating effects of EE. However, the factors mediating the effect of environmental stimuli on behavior and plasticity has been only partially identified. Interestingly, it has been suggested that chemokines can play a key role in the flexibility of hippocampal structure and may modulate neuronal signaling during behavior. The question is how cytokines may translate environmental stimuli in plasticity and behavioral changes. This research topic is proposed to explore the role of cytokines, and more in particular chemokines, in the modulation of neuronal activity as a fundamental step for the correct brain wiring, function and susceptibility to environment. We encourage the submission of original research reports, review articles, commentaries, perspectives or short communications, in the following (but not limited to) topics: - Role of cytokines and chemokines in neuronal plasticity - Immune molecules and responsiveness to environment - Role of chemokine in the flexibility of hippocampal structure
Download or read book New frontiers in the neuropsychopharmacology of mental illness written by Thibault Renoir and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, mental illnesses have become recognized as a huge emotional and financial burden to the individual, their relatives and society at large. Stress-related and mood disorders as well as psychoactive substance abuse are among the disorders associated with most disability in high income countries. Suicide, which is often attributed to some underlying mental disorders, is a leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults. At the same time, mental disorders pose some of the toughest challenges in neuroscience research. There are many different categories of mental disorder as defined and classified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases 10th Revision (ICD-10). Despite the ongoing improvements of those widely used manuals, the validity and reliability of their diagnoses remain a constant debate. However, it has now become accepted by the scientific community that mental disorders can arise from multiple sources. In that regard, both clinical and animal studies looking at gene-environment interactions have helped to better understand the mechanisms involved in the pathophysiology as well as the discovery of treatments for mental disorders. This Research Topic aims to cover recent progress in research studying how genetic make-up and environmental factors (such as stress paradigm or pharmacological treatment) can contribute to the development of mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia. This Research Topic also seeks to highlight studies looking at affective-like disorders following the intake of drugs of abuse. We also welcome all research articles, review papers, brief communications, and commentary on topics related to the broad field of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Download or read book Plant Biotechnology written by Agnès Ricroch and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in easy to follow language, the book presents cutting-edge agriculturally relevant plant biotechnologies and applications in a manner that is accessible to all. This book updates and introduces the scope and method of plant biotechnologies and molecular breeding within the context of environmental analysis and assessment, a diminishing supply of productive arable land, scarce water resources and climate change. New plant breeding techniques including CRISPR-cas system are now tools to meet these challenges both in developed countries and in developing countries. Ethical issues, intellectual property rights, regulation policies in various countries related to agricultural biotechnology are examined. The rapid developments in plant biotechnology are explained to a large audience with relevant examples. New varieties of crops can be adapted to new climatic conditions in order to reduce pest-associated losses and the adverse abiotic effects
Download or read book 5 HT2B Receptors written by Luc Maroteaux and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This contributed volume provides a comprehensive assessment of the roles played by 5-HT2B receptors in humans. These receptors have been shown to play an important role is the cardiac, intestinal, and central nervous systems as well as in bone marrow formation and growth. In this book, expert researchers present their findings on molecular and physiological/pathological aspects of 5-HT2B receptors. The molecular section includes a discussion of the genetics of 5-HT2B receptors and impulse control. The physiological section covers their role in many biological systems including the nervous system, the heart, and the lungs.
