Population Genetics and Evolution

At least since the 1940s neo-Darwinism has prevailed as the consensus view in the study of evolution. The mechanism of evolution in this view is natural selection leading to adaptation, working on a substrate of adapta­ tionally random mutations. As both the study of genetic variation in natural populations, and the study of the mathematical equations of selec­ tion are reckoned to a field called population genetics, population genetics came to form the core in the theory of evolution. So much so, that the fact that there is more to the theory of evolution than population genetics became somewhat obscured. The genetics of the evolutionary process, or the genetics of evolutionary change, came close to being all of evolutionary biology. In the last 10 years, this dominating position of population genetics within evolutionary biology has been challenged. In evolutionary ecology, optimization theory proved more useful than population genetics for interesting predictions, especially of life history strategies. From develop­ mental biology, constraints in development and the role of internal regula­ tion were emphasized. From paleobiology, a proposal was put forward to describe the fossil record and the evolutionary process as a series of punc­ tuated equilibria; thus exhorting population geneticists to give a plausible account of how such might come about. All these developments tend to obscure the central role of population genetics in evolutionary biology. Front Matter....Pages I-XI Introduction: The Place of Population Genetics in Evolutionary Biology....Pages 1-11 Front Matter....Pages 13-13 The Necessity of Population Genetics for Understanding Evolution: An Ecologist’s View....Pages 14-18 Unexploited Dimensions of Optimization Life History Theory....Pages 19-32 Theory of Phenotypic Evolution: Genetic or Non-Genetic Models?....Pages 33-41 Empirical Analysis of Sex Allocation in Ants: From Descriptive Surveys to Population Genetics....Pages 42-51 Fitness and Mode of Inheritance....Pages 52-62 The Maintenance of Genetic Variation: A Functional Analytic Approach to Quantitative Genetic Models....Pages 63-72 Quantitative Genetic Models for Parthenogenetic Species....Pages 73-82 Quantitative Genetics of Life History Evolution in a Migrant Insect....Pages 83-93 The Evolution of Genetic Correlation and Developmental Constraints....Pages 94-101 Models of Fluctuating Selection for a Quantitative Trait....Pages 102-108 Components of Selection: An Expanded Theory of Natural Selection....Pages 109-118 The Genetics of Information and the Evolution of Avatars....Pages 119-123 Sib Competition as an Element of Genotype-Environment Interaction for Body Size in the Great Tit....Pages 124-137 The Measured Genotype Approach to Ecological Genetics....Pages 138-146 Front Matter....Pages 147-147 What Is the Progress Towards Understanding the Selection Webs Influencing Melanic Polymorphisms in Insects?....Pages 148-162 Ethanol Adaptation and Alcohol Dehydrogenase Polymorphism in Drosophila : From Phenotypic Functions to Genetic Structures....Pages 163-172 Multigenic Selection in Plantago and Drosophila , Two Different Approaches....Pages 173-186 The Functional Significance of Regulatory Gene Variation: The α-Amylase Gene-Enzyme System of Drosophila melanogaster ....Pages 187-190 Clonal Niche Organization in Triploid Parthenogenetic Trichoniscus pusillus : A Comparison of Two Kinds of Microevolutionary Events....Pages 191-201 Front Matter....Pages 147-147 Microgeographic Variation of Genetic Polymorphism in Argyresthia mendica (Lep.: Argyresthiidae)....Pages 202-208 The Significance of Sexual Reproduction on the Genetic Structure of Populations....Pages 209-214 Patch-Time Allocation by Insect Parasitoids: Superparasitism and Aggregation....Pages 215-221 The Significance of Developmental Constraints for Phenotypic Evolution by Natural Selection....Pages 222-229 Selection on Morphological Patterns....Pages 230-250 The Evolutionary Potential of the Unstable Genome....Pages 251-263 Consequences of a Model of Counter-Gradient Selection....Pages 264-277 Back Matter....Pages 279-282 This volume reevaluates the position of population genetics in evolutionary biology by using population genetics as the tool to study the role of development and adaptation in evolution. The emphasis is on the organismic process of selection, and on how the study of selection means connecting variation at the molecular, biochemical, and phenotypic levels of organization with the resulting variation in fitness. This book illustrates that the tendency to view single locus differences in isolation as the building blocks of evolution is disappearing. Population genetics proves to be a wider field than just the study of single gene differences Papers Presented at a Symposium at Woudschoten, Utrecht, the Netherlands, September 7-13, 1986