1999 NEJM classic

CCDB is a comprehensive database of all genomic, proteomic and metabolomic information related to the E. coli. Quantitative and qualitative information that are stored in CCDB and its sub-databases are used to run simulations at the organism level

DA - 19971211 IS - 0028-0836 LA - eng PT - Journal Article RN - 0 (Bacterial Proteins) RN - 0 (DNA, Bacterial) SB - IM SB - S

Abstract: An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in england and the united states during the past forty years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an organism into unitary "traits" and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; nonoptimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental europe) that organisms must be analyzed as integrated wholes, with baupläne so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development, and general architecture that the constraints themselves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. [More] [Full Text Link]