Juli Peretó - Böcker

This book collects three outstanding examples of the work of Mexican biologist Alfonso Luis Herrera (1868-1943), a pioneer in experimental origins of life research.

This book collects three outstanding examples of the work of Mexican biologist Alfonso Luis Herrera (1868-1943), a pioneer in experimental origins of life research. Two of the collected works appear here in English for the first time. Herrera's works represent the attempt to deal experimentally with the issue of an autotrophic origin of life, a possibility that was widely accepted prior to Alexander I. Oparin's ideas regarding the possibility of organic synthesis and the origin of life in an early Earth environment. An active promoter of Darwinian ideas in Latin America, Herrera was also among the first 20th century researchers to attempt to “create life in a test tube.”This collection shows the remarkable prescience of researchers in Mexico with regards to laboratory approaches to the problem of the origin of life. It also includes a modern commentary by researchers actively engaged in research in prebiotic evolution and the origins of life, and deeply concerned with the historical development of ideas in these fields. The list includes H. James Cleaves, Antonio Lazcano, Alicia Negrón-González and Juli Peretó, who discuss in detail the relevance of Herrera's ideas to modern theory and their historical context. The book will expose modern readers and researchers to currents of thinking that have been lost, largely to time and language inaccessibility, of a seminal early theoretical biologist.

This open access book exposes the role of "agency" in the history of life. Agency is understood as the capacity of an organism to act, make decisions, and exercise control over its actions in order to achieve goals or to navigate and interact with its environment. The question of agency has become a hot and controversial topic in Biology and Philosophy of the Natural Sciences. This volume studies said topic through its historical expressions, investigating how and why it has appeared, and what was its selective advantage in the past, assuming a continuity in how it has evolved in different life forms. By also explaining how and why agency has evolved and become more complex in some branches of the tree of life, the authors show how life has made its way on our planet with forms of agency as diverse as those shown by bacteria, plants or animals, which are the most sophisticated and complex agents. The book is of great interest to a broad audience, whether philosophically or biologically inclined, interested in understanding fundamental aspects of how life works and in seeking explanations for why life has been so successful on planet Earth.

Synthetic Biology (SB) is a revolutionary discipline with a vast range of practical applications, but is SB research really based on engineering principles? Does it contributing to the artificial synthesis of life or does it utilise approaches sufficiently advanced to fall outside the scope of biotechnology or metabolic engineering? This volume reviews the development of SB and includes the major milestones of the discipline, the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches towards the construction of an artificial cell and the development of the “iGEM” competition. We conclude that SB is an emerging field with extraordinary technological potential, but that most research projects actually are an extension of metabolic engineering since the complexity of living organisms, their tight dependence on evolution and our limited knowledge of the interactions between the molecules, actually make life difficult to engineer.

This book presents a series of perspectives showing the current knowledge about human evolution. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Darwin's book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which he explicitly addresses the natural origin of the human species, this collective work reviews current and diverse aspects of human evolution: from psychology, linguistics, genomics, paleontology, artistic expression or sexual selection. It also offers a historical, social and ideological context of what is often considered to be Darwin's second great work after The Origin of Species.Although current research is concentrated largely on fossils and genomes, this book also deals with the main points Darwin centered his attention on; comparative morphology and psychology, and sexual selection. It also covers other new aspects, such as the origin of art, social structure and social learning. With contributions from leading experts in their respective fields, the book guides readers to the study of the social context of Darwin and his time, and the state of the art of studies on human evolution and sexual selection, considering all aspects that Darwin examined, including those that emerged later and now are important disciplines in our understanding of our own evolution.The English translation of parts of this book from its Spanish original manuscript was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.