Why Evolution in a Book on Polymers

Charles Darwin pubhshed first edition of his Origin of Species in 1859. Ever since evolution remains the major organizing principle for all of life sciences the cliche quotation from T. Dobzhansky (1900-1975) says it all Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution . 

To see evolution happening one does not have to go to a paleontological musemn flu epidemic, for instance, happens every year, precisely because 

Possibly the most impressive example of evolution is our body s reaction to a flu or a similar infection. The initial symptoms are familiar to everyone head aches, body aches, eyes sore, nose runs all we want is to stay in bed. This continues for a few days, and then. .. then we feel better. How does this miracle happen In fact, what happens inside our body is. .. yes, evolution. We will not go into details, but in one sentence the cells of our immune system evolve to acquire a completely new ability to recognize and destroy the virulent intruder. 

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. 

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