8. The non-adaptive null hypothesis of genome evolution and origins of biological complexity

Evolutionary entropy and complexity

Few buzzwords in the last two decades have been as popular and at the same time defined in as many different, often contradictory, and sometimes misleading ways as complexity.1 All this celebrity status notwithstanding, the notion of complexity obviously captures a common, fundamentally important phenomenon that permeates all of biology and also reaches beyond the biological realm. Unlike many scientific terms, complexity has an undeniable vernacular meaning. As in the case of pornography, we know it when we see it. Everyone recognizes that a mammal or a bird is more complex than a worm, whereas the worm is more complex ...

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