Real-World Probability Books: Evolution
Dawkins, Richard.
Climbing Mount Improbable.
Norton, 1997.
Like Dawkins other books [e.g. The Selfish Gene] this is a wonderful popular exposition of evolutionary biology.
Something every educated person should read, albeit not so strongly
relevant to our "predictions of mathematical probability" theme.
Kauffman, Stuart A.
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in
Evolution.
Oxford University Press, 1993.
Author is - and sounds like - the model for the fictional mathematician
in Jurassic Park.
Ambitious sprawling work studies abstracted math models of different
levels of evolution: DNA, proteins, genetic regulatory networks, ecosystems.
The math models are interesting as math challenges, but their relevance to
real biology is arguable.
Ward, Peter Douglas and Brownlee, Donald.
Rare Earth: why complex life is uncommon in the universe.
Copernicus 2000.
Advocates the hypothesis that,
while microscopic life might be widespread in the universe,
the evolution and long term survival of complex organisms must be rare, because on earth the latter
involved some highly fortuitous set of circumstances.
Well written and thought-provoking, though not especially convincing: see Ehrlich's
Eight Preposterous Propositions for a critique.
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