New lessons from biology for economics and business: a systems approach to non-market environments.

Drawing on recent advances in biology, this paper describes a systems approach, 'Systems Public Affairs' (SPA), to integrate non-market strategies in corporate purposes and strategies. Just as the environment of organisms affects and is affected by their development and evolution, so individuals and businesses adjust to and can shape their non-market environment, which we define as 'a historically formed national and social sphere, including laws, regulations, and policies, which supports, maintains and restrains the operation and preservation of markets'. The paper uses cases from South Korea to illustrate this approach.

Speciation by physiological selection of environmentally acquired traits.

A chance mutation affecting a single or extremely few individuals in a continuous population will be quickly diluted through interbreeding. Charles Darwin fully appreciated this difficulty with relying on natural selection alone, and suggested an enabling role for geographical isolation in the origin of species. However, Darwin also believed in evolution by the inheritance of acquired traits and in populations of interbreeding animals, both of which would need a different isolating mechanism to overcome dilution and play a role in animal evolution.

Bubbling beyond the barrier: exosomal RNA as a vehicle for soma-germline communication.

'Weismann's barrier' has restricted theories of heredity to the transmission of genomic variation for the better part of a century. However, the discovery and elucidation of epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation such as DNA methylation and histone modifications has renewed interest in studies on the inheritance of acquired traits and given them mechanistic plausibility. Although it is now clear that these mechanisms allow many environmentally acquired traits to be transmitted to the offspring, how phenotypic information is communicated from the body to its gametes has remained a mystery.

Impoverished Conceptions of Gene Causation and Therapy in Developmental Neurology.

We offer a primer to the modifiability of genetic neurological disease, particularly during development. One goal is to harness several unexpected observations made in the course of experimental gene modification or therapy into an explanatory conceptual context based on biological first principles. To this end, we anchor growing, disparate reports of unusual or untoward effects to a plausible framework wherein genes exhibit different degrees of modifiability and may result, when mutated or therapeutically modified, in unsuspected consequences.

Silvio Weidmann: laying the foundations for unravelling the mechanism of heart rhythm.

Silvio Weidmann laid the basis of cardiac electrophysiology and was the forerunner in the search for mechanisms governing the electrical activity of the heart in his legendary first studies of Purkinje fibres in the 1950s. His work was the cornerstone of research in this field for many generations, and countless cardiologists and electrophysiologists have based their studies on the knowledge generated by Weidmann's pioneering data. This review summarizes his key contributions from the first intracellular recordings of cardiac membrane potentials in 1949 to the publication of his monograph in 1956.

Biological relativity revisited: the pre-eminent role of values.

Multilevel interpretations of development and evolution take to heart the contextual nature of both those processes, and so necessarily assume top-down causation occurs, right down to the physics level. In this article we revisit the Principle of Biological Relativity proposed by Noble in 2012, where all emergent levels of organisation are equally causally valid. While this is true in general for physical interactions between levels, we argue that in the case of conscious organisms making rational choices, there is indeed a preferred causal origin - namely the overall embracing influence of meaning and values.

Origins and demise of selfish gene theory.

The idea of The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976, grew out of the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology formulated by Julian Huxley in 1942, and more specifically from George Williams' Adaptation and Natu - ral Selection in 1966. It presents a severely narrowed down version of Huxley's synthesis, which developed in the 1960s following the formulation of the Cen tral Dogma of molecular biology by Francis Crick. The idea rests on three assumptions: the isolation of the genome from any influences by the soma and its development in interaction with the environment (the Weis - mann Barrier), one-way causation from DNA to proteins (The Central Dogma), and the autoreplication of DNA (Schrödinger's aperiodic crystal).

Modern physiology vindicates Darwin's dream.

New Findings: What is the topic of this review? Revisiting the 2013 article 'Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology'. What advances does it highlight? The discovery that the genome is not isolated from the soma and the environment, and that there is no barrier preventing somatic characteristics being transmitted to the germline, means that Darwin's pangenetic ideas become relevant again.

Abstract: Charles Darwin spent the last decade of his life collaborating with physiologists in search of the biological processes of evolution.

Review of historic article: Butler, J.A.V., Johns, E.W. and Philips, D. M. P. 1968. Recent investigations on histones and their functions. Progress in Biophysics and molecular biology, 18, 209-244.

This Historic Article was based on pioneering work by the laboratory of the Founding Editor of the journal to characterise the different forms of histones in the nucleus and their relationship with DNA. The classification determined in 1968 bears strong relationship to that known today. Most importantly, the work clarified that the inhibitory effect of histones on DNA is a general one and would not explain the subsequent differentiation of cells during development in multicellular organisms.

Review of historic article: Ebashi, S & Endo, M. 1968 Calcium Ion and Muscle Contraction. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 18, 123-183.

The 1968 review article on Calcium ion and muscle contraction by Setsuro Ebashi and Makoto Endo is one of the highest cited in the journal since it was required reading in the early days of understanding what triggers contraction of the myofilaments. It correctly identified the major steps in excitation-contraction coupling and still inspires mathematical models of muscle activity today. It also successfully identified the role of troponin.

Review of historic article: Skou 1964 enzymatic aspects of active linked transport of Na and K through the cell membrane. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 14, 133-166.

In this historic article we witness the author's own account of his great discovery: the nature and location of the enzyme system enabling sodium-potassium exchange across membranes in living cells, particularly nerve cells. That discovery has stood the test of time. active ion transport of sodium and potassium ions through cell membranes is ubiquitous.

Review of historic article: Huxley 1957 Muscle Structure and theories of contraction. Progress in Biophysics and biophysical chemistry, 7, 255-318.

The article by Andrew Huxley in this journal in 1957, "Muscle Structure and theories of Contraction" is much more than a standard review of a field. It is itself a major theoretical modelling achievement: the first mathematical model of the contractile process in skeletal muscle. That model was based on careful microscopic analysis of the striation patterns in skeletal muscles.

A Quantitative Systems Pharmacology Perspective on the Importance of Parameter Identifiability.

There is an inherent tension in Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) between the need to incorporate mathematical descriptions of complex physiology and drug targets with the necessity of developing robust, predictive and well-constrained models. In addition to this, there is no "gold standard" for model development and assessment in QSP. Moreover, there can be confusion over terminology such as model and parameter identifiability; complex and simple models; virtual populations; and other concepts, which leads to potential miscommunication and misapplication of methodologies within modeling communities, both the QSP community and related disciplines.

Cellular Darwinism: Regulatory networks, stochasticity, and selection in cancer development.

There are strong parallels between the evolutionary origin of species within populations of organisms and new concepts for the origin of cancers within cell populations in the tissues of the body. The analogy is that cancers can be regarded as a new somatic species developing within the host organism. In both cases, understanding the processes involved requires a multi-scale analysis, including higher-level control of genetic and epigenetic changes.