The Evolution of Population Biology

About this book

This unique collection of essays deals with the foundation and historical development of population biology and its relationship to population genetics and population ecology on the one hand and to the rapidly growing fields of molecular quantitative genetics, genomics and bioinformatics on the other. Such an interdisciplinary treatment of population biology has never been attempted before. The volume is set in a historical context, but it has an up-to-date coverage of material in various related fields.

The areas covered are the foundation of population biology, life history evolution and demography, density and frequency dependent selection, recent advances in quantitative genetics and bioinformatics, evolutionary case history of model organisms focusing on polymorphisms and selection, mating system evolution and evolution in the hybrid zones, and applied population biology including conservation, infectious diseases and human diversity. This is the third of three volumes published in honour of Richard Lewontin.

-Forges a link between population genetics and population ecology -Reviews the use of molecular techniques in population genetics -Covers the application of population biology to agriculture, conservation and health

Contents

Introduction; Part I. Historical Foundations and Perspectives: 1. Building a science of population biology Richard Lewontin; 2. Toward a population biology, still Richard Levins; Part II. Genotypes to Phenotypes: New Genetic and Bioinformatic Advances: 3. Genetic dissection of quantitative traits Trudy Mackay; 4. Gene expression profiling in evolutionary genetics Daniel Hartl, Colin Meiklejohn, Cristian Castillo-Davis, Duccio Cavelieri, Jose Ranz and Jeffrey Townsend; 5. Population biology and bioinformatics Brian Golding; 6. Beyond beanbag genetics: Wright's adaptive landscape, gene interaction networks and the evolution of new genetic systems Rama Singh and Richard Morton; Part III. Phenotypes to Fitness: Genetics and Ecology of Populations: 7. Density dependant selection Freddy Christiansen; 8. Non-synonymous polymorphisms and frequency-dependent selection Bryan Clarke; 9. Why k=4NA s is silly John Gillespie; 10. Inferences about the structure and history of populations: Coalescents and intraspecific phylogeography John Wakeley; 11. The population genetics of life-history evolution Brian Charlesworth; 12. Gene-environment complexities: what is so interesting to measure and to model? Peter Taylor; 13. Genus-specific diversification of mating types Marcy Uyenoyama and Naoki Takebayashi; Part III. Genes, Organisms and Environment: Evolutionary Case Studies: 14. Adaptation, constraint, and neutrality: mechanistic case studies with butterflies and their general implications Ward Watt; 15. Evolution in hybrid zones Daniel Howard, Seth Britch, W. Evan Braswell and Jeremy Marshall; 16. Nine relatives from one African ancestor: Population biology and evolution of the Drosophila melanogaster subgroup species Daniel Lachaise, Pierre Capy, Marie-Louise Cariou, Dominique Joly, Francoise Lemeunier and Jean R. David; Part IV. Applied Population Biology: Biodiversity and Food, Disease and Health: 17. Conservation biology: where are we? Philip Hedrick; 18. The emergence of modern human mortality patterns Shripad Tuljapurkar; 19. Units of selection and the evolution of virulence Paul Ewald and Gregory Cochran; 20. Evolutionary genetics and emergence of RNA virus diseases Edward Holmes; 21. A scientific adventure: a fifty years study of human evolution Luigi Cavalli-Sforza; 22. Geneticists and the biology of race, 1900--1924 Will Provine.

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Biography

Rama Singh is Professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster University, Ontario. Marcy Uyenoyama is Professor in the Department of Biology at Duke University, North Carolina.