Now in its third edition and
supplemented with more online material, this book aims to make the
"new" information-based (rather than gene-based) bioinformatics
intelligible
both to the "bio" people and the "info" people. Books on bioinformatics
have traditionally served gene-hunters, and biologists who wish to
construct family trees showing tidy lines of descent. While dealing
extensively with the exciting topics of gene discovery
and database-searching, such books have hardly considered genomes as
information channels through which multiple forms and levels of
information have passed through the generations. This “new
bioinformatics” contrasts with the "old" gene-based bioinformatics
that so preoccupies previous texts. Forms of information that we are
familiar with (mental, textual) are related to forms with which we are
less familiar (hereditary). The book extends a line of evolutionary
thought that leads from the nineteenth century (Darwin,
Butler, Romanes, Bateson), through the twentieth (Goldschmidt, White),
and into the twenty first (the final works of the late Stephen Jay
Gould). Long an area of controversy, diverging views may now be
reconciled.