Evolutionary Biology With Molecular Precision

Evolutionary biology benefits from a non-reductionist focus on real biological systems at the macroscopic level of their natural and historical contexts. This high-level approach makes sense since selection pressures operate at the level of phenotypes, the observed physical traits of organisms. Still, it is understood that these traits are inherited in the form of molecular gene sequences, the purview of molecular biology. The approach of molecular biology is more reductionist, focusing at the level of precise molecular structures. Molecular biology thereby benefits from a rigorous standard of evidence-based inference by isolating variables in controlled experiments. But it necessarily sets aside much of the complexity of nature. A combination of these two, in the form of evolutionary biochemistry, targets a functional synthesis of evolutionary biology and molecular biology, using techniques such as ancestral protein reconstruction to physically ‘resurrect’ ancestral proteins with precise molecular structures and to observe their resulting expressed traits experimentally.