Table of Contents

One: Evolution of Life and Evolutionary Theory.- Evolution and Life’s Emergence under Prebiotic Conditions and in a Test-Tube.- Aging and the Environment: the Stress Theories.- Assessing Population Subdivision.- Convergent Evolution in Extremely Halophilic Prokaryotes: A Comparison between Salinibacter ruber (Bacteria) and the Halobacteriaceae (Archaea).- Complex Dynamics of Multilocus Genetic Systems Caused by Cyclical Selection.- Evolutionary Epistemology and Invalidation.- Two: Genome Evolution.- Tuning Function of Tandemly Repeating Sequences: A Molecular Device for Fast Adaptation.- Comparative Mammalian Genomics and Adaptive Evolution: Divergent Homologs and Novel Genes in the Cattle Genome.- Selection Induced Genetic Variation: A New Model to Explain Direct and Indirect Effects of Sixty Years of Commercial Selection for Juvenile Growth Rate in Broiler Chickens, with Implications for Episodes of Rapid Evolutionary Change.- Pseudogenes Are Not Junk DNA.- Genome Signature Comparisons of the Proteobacteria.- Three: Phylogeography and Phylogeny.- A Maximum Likelihood Framework for Cross Validation of Phylogeographic Hypotheses.- Modern View on the Origin and Phylogenetic Reconstruction of Homobasidiomycetes Fungi.- Macroevolutionary Events and the Origin of Higher Taxa.- Four: Human Evolution and Ecology.- Humankind’s Place in a Phylogenetic Classification of Living Primates.- Evolution and Aging: Relation to Cellular Senescence and Telomere Biology.- The Evolution of Human Hairlessness: Cultural Adaptations and the Ectoparasite Hypothesis.- The Evolution of the Cultural Mediterranean Landscape in Israel as Affected by Fire, Grazing, and Human Activities.