Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.
The term autopoiesis, one of several current theories of life, refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts. The term was introduced in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.
Konstantin Sergeevich Mereschkowski was a Russian biologist and botanist, active mainly around Kazan, whose research on lichens led him to propose the theory of symbiogenesis – that larger, more complex cells evolved from the symbiotic relationship between less complex ones. He presented this theory in 1910, in his work, The Theory of Two Plasms as the Basis of Symbiogenesis, a New Study of the Origins of Organisms, although the fundamentals of the idea had already appeared in his earlier 1905 work, The nature and origins of chromatophores in the plant kingdom.
An undulipodium or undulopodium, or a 9+2 organelle is a motile filamentous extracellular projection of eukaryotic cells. It is basically synonymous to flagella and cilia which are differing terms for similar molecular structures used on different types of cells, and usually correspond to different waveforms.
Thermosynthesis is a theoretical mechanism proposed by Anthonie Muller for biological use of the free energy in a temperature gradient to drive energetically uphill anabolic reactions. It makes use of this thermal gradient, or the dissipative structure of convection in this gradient, to drive a microscopic heat engine that performs condensation reactions. Thus negative entropy is generated. The components of the biological thermosynthesis machinery concern progenitors of today's ATP synthase, which functions according to the binding change mechanism, driven by chemiosmosis. Resembling primitive free energy generating physico-chemical processes based on temperature-dependent adsorption to inorganic materials such as clay, this simple type of energy conversion is proposed to have sustained the origin of life, including the emergence of the RNA World. For this RNA World it gives a model that describes the stepwise acquisition of the set of transfer RNAs that sustains the Genetic code. The phylogenetic tree of extant transfer RNAs is consistent with the idea.
Ascendency or ascendancy is a quantitative attribute of an ecosystem, defined as a function of the ecosystem's trophic network. Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.
Johann Peter Gogarten is a German-American biologist studying the early evolution of life. Born in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, he studied plant physiology and membrane transport with Friedrich-Wilhelm Bentrup in Tübingen and Giessen. In 1987 he moved to the US as a postdoc to work with Lincoln Taiz at UC Santa Cruz. He currently is Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT.
Ervin Bauer was a Hungarian biologist.
Within biological systems, degeneracy occurs when structurally dissimilar components/pathways can perform similar functions under certain conditions, but perform distinct functions in other conditions. Degeneracy is thus a relational property that requires comparing the behavior of two or more components. In particular, if degeneracy is present in a pair of components, then there will exist conditions where the pair will appear functionally redundant but other conditions where they will appear functionally distinct.
In quantum mechanics, internal measurement refers to the measurement of a quantum system by an observer.
Bioelectrodynamics is a branch of medical physics and bioelectromagnetism which deals with rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields in biological systems, i.e. high frequency endogenous electromagnetic phenomena in living cells. Unlike the events studied by the electrophysiology, the generating mechanism of bioelectrodynamic phenomenon is not connected with currents of ions and its frequency is typically much higher. Examples include vibrations of electrically polar intracellular structures and non-thermal emission of photons as a result of metabolic activity.
Stefan Schuster is a German biophysicist. He is professor for bioinformatics at the University of Jena.
Michael Earl Conrad (1941–2000) was an American theoretical biologist. He was a professor of computer science at Wayne State University. His book Adaptability (1983) has been very influential in theoretical biology.
Attila Grandpierre is a Hungarian musician, astrophysicist, physicist, self-taught historian, writer and poet. He is best known as leader/vocalist of the Galloping Coroners, an original shamanic music band.
Gary Bryce Fogel is an American biologist and computer scientist. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Natural Selection, Inc. He is most known for his applications of computational intelligence and machine learning to bioinformatics, computational biology, and industrial optimization.
Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky was a Soviet and Russian botanist and evolutionary biologist, best known for his seminal work, Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, which was the first work to place the theory of symbiogenesis into a Darwinian evolutionary context, as well as one of the first to redefine cell theory.
John S. McCaskill is an Australian chemist who works on the evolution of information processing in a wide variety of fields ranging from theoretical biochemistry to novel computation to artificial life and microrobotics.
Abir Ubayevich Igamberdiev is a Russian-Canadian theoretical biologist and plant scientist. He is professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. He is most known for his research on organization of plant metabolism, for the conceptual development of foundations of theoretical biology, and for his works on history and philosophy of science.
Developmental selection is selection that occurs on developmental units in an organism, such as cell lineages, embryos, and gametes or gametophytes. Generally, developmental selection is differentiated from natural selection because the targets of selection are internal to an organism contain the developmental units, rather than selection due to external environmental factors that favor specific phenotypes. However, in animals, developmental selection against offspring can manifest in the external environment, in which parents might select against offspring with developmental instabilities, or when offspring with deleterious malformations may not survive.
Efim Arsentievich Liberman. Soviet and Russian biophysicist and physiologist, winner of the USSR State Prize (1975).
