Since 1997, scientists of different disciplines sharing a deep interest in concepts and knowledge related to evolutionary biology have held the annual Evolutionary Biology Meetings in Marseille in order to discuss their research and promote collaboration. Lately scientists especially focusing on applications have also joined the group.

This book starts with the report of the "12^th Evolutionary Biology Meeting", which gives a general idea of the meeting's epistemological stance. This is followed by 22 chapters, a selection of the most representative contributions, which are grouped under the following four themes: Part I Concepts and Knowledge - Part II Modelization - Part III Applied Evolutionary Biology - Part IV Applications in Other Fields -Part IV transcends the field of biology, presenting applications of evolutionary biology in economics and astronomy.

Concept and Knowledge

Spontaneous Generation Revisited at the Molecular Level
Minimal Cell Model to Understand Origin of Life and Evolution
New Fossils and New Hope for the Origin of Angiosperms
Vertebrate Evolution: The Strange Case of Gymnophionan Amphibians
The Evolution of Morphogenetic Signalling in Social Amoebae
On the Surprising Weakness of Pancreatic Beta-Cell Antioxidant Defences: An Evolutionary Perspective
The Importance of Transpositions and Recombination to Genome Instability According hobo-Element Distribution Pattern in Completely Sequenced Genome of Drosophila melanogaster
Long-Term Evolution of Histone Families: Old Notions and New Insights into Their Mechanisms of Diversification Across Eukaryotes
Masculinization Events and Doubly Uniparental Inheritance of Mitochondrial DNA: A Model for Understanding the Evolutionary Dynamics of Gender-Associated mtDNA in Mussels
Missing the Subcellular Target: A Mechanism of Eukaryotic Gene Evolution
The Evolution of Functional Gene Clusters in Eukaryote Genomes
Knowledge Standardization in Evolutionary Biology: The Comparative Data Analysis Ontology
Modeling
Large-Scale Analyses of Positive Selection Using Codon Models
Molecular Coevolution and the Three-Dimensionality of Natural Selection
The Evolutionary Constraints in Mutational Replacements
Why Phylogenetic Trees are Often Quite Robust Against Lateral Transfers
Applied Evolutionary Biology
The Genome Sequence of Meloidogyne incognita Unveils Mechanisms of Adaptation to Plant-Parasitism in Metazoa
Ecological Genomics of Nematode Community Interactions: Model and Non-model Approaches
Comparative Evolutionary Histories of Fungal Chitinases
Aging: Evolutionary Theory Meets Genomic Approaches
Applications in Other Fields
Galaxies and Cladistics
Economics Pursuing the Mold of Evolutionary Biology: "Accident" and "Necessity" in the Quest to make Economics Scientific.