This book introduces a cutting-edge mathematical formalism based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and organismal evolution.

Farming Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process introduces a cutting-edge mathematical formalism based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and organismal evolution. The authors apply the new formalism toward characterizing a number of infectious diseases that have evolved in response to the world as humans have made it. Many of the human pathogens that are emerging out from underneath epidemiological control are 'farmed' in the metaphorical sense, as the evolution of drug-resistant HIV makes clear, but also quite literally, as demonstrated by avian influenza's emergence from poultry farms in southern China. The most successful pathogens appear able to integrate selection pressures humans have imposed upon them from a variety of socioecological scales. The book also presents a related treatment of Eigen's Paradox and the RNA 'error catastrophe' that bedevils models of the origins of viruses and of biological life itself.

Autorentext

Rodrick Wallace is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia and completed postdoctoral training in the epidemiology of mental disorders at Rutgers. He worked as a public interest lobbyist, including two decades conducting empirical studies of fire service deployment, and subsequently received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition to material on public health and public policy, he has published peer-reviewed studies modeling evolutionary process and heterodox economics, as well as many quantitative analyses of institutional, machine, and biological cognition. He publishes extensively in the military science literature and received one of the UK MoD RUSI Trench Gascoigne Essay Awards.

Klappentext

Farming Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process introduces a cutting-edge formalism based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and organismal evolution. The development is applied to several infectious diseases that have evolved in response to the world as humans have made it. Many pathogens emerging from underneath epidemiological control are 'farmed' in the metaphorical sense, as the evolution of drug resistant HIV makes clear, but some, like avian influenza, emerge quite literally as the result of new practices in industrial farming. Effective disease control in the 21st Century must necessarily involve broad economic and social reform for reasons embedded in the basics of pathogen evolution.

Inhalt
Formal theory I.- Formal theory II.- Coevolution.- Eigen#x2019;s paradox.- Farming human pathogens.- Final Remarks.