Current Themes in Theoretical Biology [electronic resource] : A Dutch Perspective / edited by Thomas A.C. Reydon, Lia Hemerik.

The History of Acta Biotheoretica and the Nature of Theoretical Biology -- Images of the Genome: From Public Debates to Biology, and Back, and Forth -- The Functional Perspective of Organismal Biology -- Infectious Biology: Curse or Blessing? Reflections on Biology in Other Disciplines, with a Case Study of Migraine -- The Composite Species Concept: A Rigorous Basis for Cladistic Practice -- The Wonderful Crucible of Life's Creation: An Essay on Contingency versus Inevitability of Phylogenetic Development -- The Symbiontic Nature of Metabolic Evolution -- The Founder and Allee Effects in the Patch Occupancy Metapopulation Model -- Balancing Statistics and Ecology: Lumping Experimental Data for Model Selection -- Resilience and Persistence in the Context of Stochastic Population Models -- Evolution of Specialization and Ecological Character Displacement: Metabolic Plasticity Matters.

This book originated as a Festschrift to mark the publication of Volume 50 of the journal `Acta Biotheoretica' in 2002 and the journal's 70th anniversary in 2005. In it, eleven previously unpublished research papers have been collected that reflect the entire scope of topics on which `Acta Biotheoretica' publishes. `Acta Biotheoretica' is a journal on theoretical biology, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, that has its roots in the Dutch tradition of theoretical biology. From the perspective of this tradition, theoretical biology is understood as encompassing a broad spectrum of disciplines ranging from mathematical biology to philosophy of biology. To reflect the Dutch roots of the journal, all papers have been invited from authors that work in The Netherlands. This book is aimed at an audience of theoretical and mathematical biologists, philosophers of biology and philosophers of science, and biologists in general.