Does nothing in evolution make sense except in the light of population genetics?
Biology and Philosophy 24 (3):387-403 (2009)
| Abstract | “ The Origins of Genome Architecture ” by Michael Lynch (2007) may not immediately sound like a book that someone interested in the philosophy of biology would grab off the shelf. But there are three important reasons why you should read this book. Firstly, if you want to understand biological evolution, you should have at least a passing familiarity with evolutionary change at the level of the genome. This is not to say that everyone interested in evolution should be a geneticist or a bioinformatician, but that a working knowledge of genetic change is an essential part of the intellectual toolkit of modern evolutionary biology, even if your primary focus is the evolution of behaviour or the diversity of communities. Secondly, this book provides excellent examples of another important tool in the biologist’s intellectual toolkit, but one that is rarely explained or illustrated to such an extent: null (or neutral) models. The role null models play in testing hypotheses in evolution is a central focus of this book. Thirdly, as an accomplished work of advocacy for a strictly microevolutionary view of evolution, this book provides grist for the mill for the important debate about whether population genetic processes are the sine qua non of evolutionary explanations. | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesD. R. Brooks (1988). Evolution as Entropy: Toward a Unified Theory of Biology. University of Chicago Press.
David Young (2007). The Discovery of Evolution. Cambridge University Press, in Association with Natural History Museum, London.
Ernst Mayr (1991). One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. Harvard University Press.
Barbara L. Horan (1994). The Statistical Character of Evolutionary Theory. Philosophy of Science 61 (1):76-95.
Bradley E. Wilson (1996). Changing Conceptions of Species. Biology and Philosophy 11 (3):405-420.
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Sahotra Sarkar (2004). Evolutionary Theory in the 1920s: The Nature of the "Synthesis". Philosophy of Science 71 (5):1215-1226.
Roberta L. Millstein & Robert A. Skipper (2007). Population Genetics. In David L. Hull & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge University Press.
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