Eugene Koonin



Eugene V. Koonin is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA. He is a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.

Biography
Koonin gained a Master of Science in 1978 and a PhD in 1983 in Molecular Biology from the Department of Biology, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia.

Evolution
He is the author of the controversial book The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (2011). According to Koonin, recent research in genome evolution and systems biology has replaced many tenets of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He calls for a post-evolutionary synthesis which incorporates this new data. He has written that the new synthesis will be characterized by the pluralism of many processes and patterns in evolution that defies any straightforward generalization.

In his paper titled Is evolution Darwinian or/and Lamarckian? he wrote that "Darwinian and Lamarckian modalities of evolution appear to be important, and reflect different aspects of the interaction between populations and the environment."