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The ‘Gibbs energy’ is invariably difficult to explain to those who don’t know what it is. And despite its importance, it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Max Rubner, the German physicist and physiologist, at last convinced other scientists that the energy that biological organisms use in metabolic processes exactly equals [...]
Read more ...So what is a circumambulation, and why is it relevant to biology and evolution? Brian Charlesworth wrote in his book Evolution in age-structured populations (Cambridge University Press, 1994) that: “… the concept of generation time is a rather arbitrary one”. He then lists several alternatives. It is surely rather strange that something so fundamental to [...]
Read more ...ENGENY (see definition) is how we measure Darwinian competition and evolution. It is important to correctly quantify this because as Theodosius Dobzhansky said with the title of his 1973 paper, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution (March 1973 edition of American Biology Teacher). A really big issue is, of course, [...]
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