This 2004 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.

Fascinated by the diversity of living organisms, humans have always been curious about its origin. Darwin was the first to provide the scholary and persuasive thesis for gradual evolution and speciation under natural selection. Although we now have much information on evolution, we still don't understand it in detail. Many questions still remain open due to the complexity and multiplicity of interacting factors. Several approaches mainly arising from population ecology and genetics are presented in this book in order to help understand genetic variation and evolution.

How do plant and animal populations change genetically to evolve and adapt to their local environments? How do populations grow and interact with one another through competition and predation? How does behaviour influence ecology and evolution? This second edition of Dick Neal's unique textbook on population biology addresses these questions and offers a comprehensive analysis of evolutionary theory in the areas of ecology, population genetics, and behaviour. Taking a quantitative and Darwinian perspective, Neal uses mathematical models to develop the basic theory of population processes. Key features in this edition include new chapters on inbreeding and species interactions and community structure, a modified structure in Part II, more recent empirical examples to illustrate the application of theoretical models to the world around us, and end-of-chapter problems to help students with self-assessment. A series of spreadsheet simulations have also been conveniently located online, for students to further improve their understanding of such models.

This volume contains the papers presented at a symposium on popula tion biology sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. It was . held at the guest house of the University of Ttibingen at Oberjoch on May 15-19, 1983. Prior to this conference a small group of European biologists had met in Berlin (June 1981) and Pavia (September 1982) to discuss re search problems on the borderline between population genetics and evolutionary ecology. From the contributions and discussions at these meetings it became evident that the unification of approaches to evolutionary problems in population genetics and evolutionary ecology has not yet been suc cessful and requires further efforts. It was the consensus that a larger symposium with international participation would be helpful to con front and discuss the different approaches to population biology in order to assess "where we are now" and "where we should be going. " As a result an organizational committee was formed (F. Christiansen, S. Jayakar, V. Loeschcke, W. Scharloo, and K. W6hrmann) to iden tify topics that seemed, at least to them, to be fruitful in tackling problems in population biology. Consequently, a number of colleagues were asked to participate in the meeting. We have divided this book into chapters corresponding to the eight topics chosen. The volume begins with the relation between genotype and phenotype and is followed by a chapter on quantitative genetics and selection in natural populations.