A Periodic Table for Biology Imparting order to biological
data requires a biological way of thinking By John S. Torday
Quoted message said:From the beginning of written history, humans have gathered
information and
imparted order, starting with Denis Diderot's Encyclopedia,
to Carl Linnaeus' binomial nomenclature for the
classification of animals and plants, to today's numerous
genome annotations. Several physicists in the 19th century
had attempted to order the known elements. Notably, Dmitri
Mendeleev published his periodic table and law in 1869. Its
most stunning feature: Holes within its hierarchical
structure predict the existence and properties of
additional elements--the ultimate validation of scientific
theory and thought.
Like the chemical elements, human genome data behooves
biologists to systematize information and view it through a
new lens. In the current environment, this is being done
using statistical analyses of high-throughput genomic data,
which assumes that the genes are expressed as a result of
random occurrences. But as Albert Einstein said, "God does
not play dice with the universe." The gene pools of
contemporary species have evolved not by chance, but through
the process of natural selection. Therefore, we should be
thinking about how to exploit this process in order to
discern gene-selection patterns based on function, that is,
through functional and comparative genomics.
Read the rest at The Scientist the-the-Open ↗
scientist.com/yr2004/jun/research3_040621.html
Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek.