The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

3. Comparative genomics: Evolving genomescapes

The importance of going genomic

The fundamental principles of molecular evolution have been established, and many specific observations of major importance and impact on the fundamentals of evolutionary biology have been made in the pregenomic era (see the first two chapters). However, massive genome sequencing that started in the mid-1990s and rapidly progressed into the new millennium qualitatively changed the entire enterprise of evolutionary biology. The importance of large numbers of sequences with different degrees of divergence is obvious: This material allows researchers to investigate mechanisms and specific events of evolution with the necessary statistical rigor and to reveal even subtle ...