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This visually appealing book recounts the history of molecular ecology and evolution as seen through the personal lens of one of its most prolific practitioners, who has studied a panorama of creatures ranging from corals, sponges, and other invertebrates to a wide variety of vertebrate animals including numerous birds, mammals, herps, and fishes. The sketches are of two types: evocative drawings of the animals themselves, and more than 230 written abstracts summarizing the author's eclectic research on ecological-genetic topics spanning the microevolutionary to macroevolutionary. With the abstracts arranged by organismal group and placed in chronological order, the chapters in this book lead readers on a fascinating historical journey into the realm of molecular genetics as applied across the past four decades to intriguing questions in ecology, evolution, animal behavior, and natural history. - Encapsulates salient genetic findings on a diverse array of creatures in nature - Recounts the history of technological and conceptual developments in ecological genetics - Includes approximately 80 beautiful line drawings of the animals themselves - Provides context by preceding each abstract with an anecdote or historical backdrop - Concludes each abstract with an addendum that further contextualizes the research findings - Written by a world-leading authority in molecular ecology and evolution

Personal genomics services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com now offer what once was science fiction: the ability to sequence and analyze an individual's entire genetic code—promising, in some cases, facts about that individual's ancestry that may have remained otherwise lost. Such services draw on and contribute to the science of human population genetics that attempts to reconstruct the history of humankind, including the origin and movement of specific populations. Is it true, though, that who we are and where we come from is written into the sequence of our genomes? Are genes better documents for determining our histories and identities than fossils or other historical sources? Our interpretation of gene sequences, like our interpretation of other historical evidence, inevitably tells a story laden with political and moral values. Focusing on the work of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Julian Sorell Huxley, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, and human population genetics, History Within asks how the sciences of human origins, whether through the museum, the zoo, or the genetics lab, have shaped our idea of what it means to be human. How have these biologically based histories influenced our ideas about nature, society, and culture? As Marianne Sommer shows, the stories we tell about bones, organisms, and molecules often change the world.

Haldane, Mayr, and Beanbag Genetics presents a summary of the classic exchange between two great biologists - J.B.S. Haldane and Ernst Mayr - regarding the value of the contributions of the mathematical school represented by J.B.S. Haldane, R.A. Fisher and S. Wright to the theory of evolution. Their pioneering contributions from 1918 to the 1960s dominated and shaped the field of population genetics, unique in the annals of science. In 1959, Mayr questioned what he regarded as the beanbag genetic approach of these pioneers to evolutionary theory,'an input or output of genes, as the adding of certain beans to a beanbag and the withdrawing of others.'In 1964, Mayr's contention was refuted by Haldane in a remarkably witty, vigorous and pungent essay,'A defense of beanbag genetics'which compared the mathematical theory to a scaffolding within which a reasonably secure theory expressible in words may be built up. Correspondence between Haldane and Mayr is included. Beanbag genetics has come a long way since 1964. Mayr's (1959) critique of simple uncomplicated population genetics is no longer valid. Population genetics today includes much more than Mayr's beanbag genetics. Population genetics models now include multiple factors, linkage, dominance and epistasis. These may be regarded as the advanced beanbag models. Furthermore, population genetics and developmental genetics have become interdependent. Contemporary beanbag genetics includes molecular clocks, nucleotide diversity, coalescence and DNA-based phylogenetic trees, along with the four major holdovers from classical genetics, mutation, selection, migration and random drift. Molecular genetics has made it possible to study evolution rates at the nucleotide level. It is also possible today to compare DNA similarities and divergence in diverse species of animals and plants, which were not previously crossable.