Miller W. Cognition-Based Evolution. Natural Cellular Engineering...2023

Textbook in PDF format

A major point of emphasis in this book is that our intelligent cells utilize chance events to channel creativity. Chance entered my life through an unanticipated encounter with a ‘boy named Sue’ on a blustery fall day 15 years ago. ‘Sue’ was the towering Tyrannosaurus Rex fossilized skeleton that dominates the magnificent rotunda of the Chicago Field Museum. I had visited the museum one late afternoon seeking relaxation after many days of intensive medical meetings. There was no purpose other than a pleasant diversion. Before that moment, my interest in evolution had been superficial. Yet, one glimpse of that titanic creature changed everything.
Despite obvious differences in scale, I was startled by unanticipated resemblances between the major bones of the T. Rex and our human ones. My companion that afternoon was an astute physician and colleague who had joined me on this brief excursion. When I expressed my amazement at these anatomic similarities and my further impression that the conventional evolutionary narrative seemed critically lacking, his rejoinder was adamant. I was failing to properly appreciate geological time-spans. It was fanciful to think otherwise. For reasons that still elude me, a gauntlet had been thrown.
Preface
1. Introduction: Evolution Recast
2. Neodarwinism: Evolution in the 20th Century
3. 21st Century Evolution: The Intelligent Measuring Cell
4. The Cellular Information Cycle and Biological Information Management
5. The Senome: The Cellular Connection with Environmental Information
6. The N-space Episenome: Concordant Cellular Information
7. Natural Cellular Engineering as Multicellular Problem-solving
8. Non-random Variations in Natural Cellular Engineering
9. The Virome and Natural Viral-Cellular Engineering
10. Holobionts: A Consensual ‘We’
11. The Role of the Microbiome in the Evolution and Development of Holobionts
12. Four Domains and the Primacy of the Unicellular State
13. Speciation
14. Sexual Reproduction and its Impact on Evolutionary Variation
15. Extinction
16. Old Controversies Revisited—Where is the Cusp of Creativity?
17. The Primacy of Cellular Consciousness
18. How Might Biology Instruct Physics?
19. A Separation from the Past
20. Conclusion—The Intelligent Measuring Cell
21. Appendix: Differential Features Between Cognition-Based Evolution and the Neodarwinian Modern Synthesis