Full Description
After volume 33, this book series was replaced by the journal "Evolutionary Biology." Please visit www.springer.com/11692 for further information.
The nature of science is to work on the boundaries between the known and the unknown. These boundaries shift as new methods are developed and as new concepts are elaborated (e.g., the theory of the gene, or more recently, the coalescence framework in population genetics). These tools allow us to address questions that were previously outside the realm of science, and, as a consequence, the boundary between the knowable and unknowable has shifted. A study of limits should reveal and clarify the boundaries and make sharper the set of questions. This book examines and analyzes these new limits as they are applied to evolutionary biology and population genetics. It does this by framing the analysis within four major classes of problems - establishing the fact of evolution; understanding the evolutionary pathways that led to today's biological world; mechanisms of evolutionary change (e.g., models of social behavior, sexual selection, macro evolution); and, finally, prediction.
Contents
I. Limits to Knowledge: An Introduction.- 1. Limits to Our Knowledge of Evolution.- 2. Limits to Knowledge in Population Genetics.- II. The Philosophy of Biology, Paradigms, and Paradigm Shifts.- 3. Laws, History, and the Nature of Biological Understanding.- 4. Avoiding Paradigm-Based Limits to Knowledge of Evolution.- 5. Anticipating Scientific Revolutions in Evolutionary Genetics.- III. Limits to Historical Inference and Prediction.- 6. Inferring Ancestral Character States.- 7. The Problem of Inferring Selection and Evolutionary History from Molecular Data.- 8. Evolutionary Genetics of Primate Color Vision: Recent Progress and Potential Limits to Knowledge.- 9. The Limits to Knowledge in Conservation Genetics: The Value of Effective Population Size.- 10. What Is the Structure of Human Populations?.- IV. Quantitative Genetics and the Prediction of Phenotype from Genotype.- 11. Limits to Prediction of Phenotypes from Knowledge of Genotypes.- 12. The Limits to Knowledge in Quantitative Genetics.- 13. Genetics of Species Differentiation: What Is Unknown and What Will Be Unknowable?.- Conclusions.
