Background
Flegr, Jaroslav was born on March 12, 1958 in Prague, Czech Republic. Son of Jaroslav and Vera (Groszová) Flegr.
Flegr, Jaroslav was born on March 12, 1958 in Prague, Czech Republic. Son of Jaroslav and Vera (Groszová) Flegr.
Master of Science, Charles University, Prague, 1982. Doctor of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, 1986.
His work on the influence of toxoplasmosis infection on personality, sex ratios, and the risks of road accidents, has received some media attention, with the work on road accidents being particularly prominent. Flegr has claimed that the infection might increase the number of accidents by as much as one million crashes per year. First, it presents the reader with the principles of current evolutionary biology.
Second, the book contains sidenotes in graphically distinct boxes that discuss topics important in practitioning of science.
These are for example peer review process, scientific journals or citation metrics. Some ideas from philosophy of science like paradigm shift and Occam"s razor are also mentioned, as is some Flegr"s previous research to provide concrete examples.
The third and final goal is materialized in concluding chapters that propose the author"s idea of frozen plasticity, a new hypothesis that describes a mechanism for the origin of adaptive traits. He claims that natural selection can only explain the evolution of such adaptations under very special situations: e.g., in genetically homogeneous populations of sexual organisms or in asexual organisms.
He describes the idea of "frozen plasticity" as being more general, and contends that it can better explain the origin and evolution of adaptive traits in genetically heterogeneous population of sexual organisms.
Flegr"s ideas expressed in this part of the book are extensions on the punctuated equilibria hypothesis.
He is a parasitologist, evolutionary biologist, the author of the book and member of the editorial board of Neuroendocrinology Letters.