Synthetic theory of evolution

When this evolutionary synthesis was formulated, people did not know what are genes. In this sense, the development of synthetic evolution theory can be compared to the initial steps of thermodynamics Fourier, for instance, formulated correct heat conduction equation (and developed powerful methods to solve it — Fourier series) without any knowledge of what was heat. But once molecular nature of heat was understood, the science of thermodynamics received its natural foundation in statistical mechanics. Similarly, once the nature of genes, as the sequences of DNA coding for particular proteins, was understood — it opened up the doors for molecular understanding of evolution. And since the molecules involved are, of course, biopolymers of DNA, RNA, and proteins — we should touch upon this topic in this book. That is why we invite you to the discussion of physics underpinnings of evolution. 

This small survey of the uses of fluorination in selected substrates illustrates clearly the potential selective fluorination has as a tool to modify the reactivity and biological activity of those substances. Better and more effective understanding of chemistry of selectively fluorinated materials must necessarily await further evolution of not only synthetic methods but also of the underpinning chemical theory. Some latest advances in theory, synthetic methods and applications are chronicled in this volume on the subsequent pages. 

A. Pullman In all fairness, it must be said that the quantum chemical computations, as a rule, and quite generally, are much less satisfactory, for excited states properties than for ground state properties. This is true particularly when quantitative evaluation of a property is requested. This inconvenience appears in all its fullness for non-benzenoid hydrocarbons because the dipole moment is a striking example which does not occur in the benzenoid series, but it is true for any quantity related to excitation. As concerns qualitative evolutions of various properties, theory has been extremely successful in the past in the very case of the fulvenes and has even been instrumental in the development of the field since it has often preceded experiment and served as an incentive for the chemist to synthetize the compounds. (See the numerous series of papers by ourselves and Dr Ernst Bergmann in the early 1950 s.)... 

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