Biology's next revolution

The interpretation of recent environmental genomics data exposes the far-reaching influence of horizontal gene transfer, and is changing our basic concepts of organism, species and evolution itself.Comment: Slightly expanded version of invited essay published in Nature. The most important addition is a complete set of references that could not be included in the published version due to space limitations and acknowledgment of the grant that supported our wor

Wavelet-induced renormalization group for the Landau-Ginzburg model

The scale hierarchy of wavelets provides a natural frame for renormalization. Expanding the order parameter of the Landau-Ginzburg/$\Phi^4$ model in a basis of compact orthonormal wavelets explicitly exhibits the coupling between scales that leads to non-trivial behavior. The locality properties of Daubechies' wavelets enable us to derive the qualitative renormalization flow of the Landau-Ginzburg model from Gaussian fluctuations in wavelet space.Comment: LATTICE99(Renormalization), LaTeX, 3 page