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The central question addressed in this book is this: How is the process of adaptation different if the members of a population live clustered in small groups instead of being homogenously distributed like grass on a lawn? The field is called ‘evolution in subdivided populations’ or ‘adaptation in metapopulations.’ The book covers a diverse array of topics, including group selection, family selection, kin selection and sexual selection, as well as speciation genetics, maternal and paternal genetic effects, and host-symbiont co-evolution. These topics are addressed using a combination of conceptual, theoretical, field and laboratory studies and a diversity of living systems ranging from the laboratory model of flour beetles in the genus, Tribolium, to willow leaf beetles, to other animals, plants and microbes.

Galileo wrote that “nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones”—a statement that wonderfully captures a long-standing scientific fascination with body size. Why are organisms the size that they are? And what determines their optimum size? This volume explores animal body size from a macroecological perspective, examining species, populations, and other large groups of animals in order to uncover the patterns and causal mechanisms of body size throughout time and across the globe. The chapters represent diverse scientific perspectives and are divided into two sections. The first includes chapters on insects, snails, birds, bats, and terrestrial mammals and discusses the body size patterns of these various organisms. The second examines some of the factors behind, and consequences of, body size patterns and includes chapters on community assembly, body mass distribution, life history, and the influence of flight on body size.

The vertebrate fossil record extends back more than 500 million years, and bonebeds—localized concentrations of the skeletal remains of vertebrate animals—help unlock the secrets of this long history. Often spectacularly preserved, bonebeds—both modern and ancient—can reveal more about life histories, ecological associations, and preservation patterns than any single skeleton or bone. For this reason, they are frequently studied by paleobiologists, geologists, and archeologists seeking to piece together the vertebrate record. In this book, thirteen researchers combine their experiences to provide readers with workable definitions, theoretical frameworks, and a compendium of modern techniques in bonebed data collection and analysis. By addressing the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of bonebed research, they provide the background and methods that students and professionals need to explore and understand these records of ancient life and death.

This book provides an introduction to coevolution in both microevolutionary (ecological) and macroevolutionary (historical) time. It emphasizes the integration of cophylogenetic, comparative, and experimental approaches for testing coevolutionary hypotheses. Recent work in coevolutionary biology has been successful in demonstrating coadaptation between species in response to reciprocal selection. Fewer studies have tested the influence of coadaptation on the diversification of interacting taxa. We review studies that have attempted to do just this. The overriding question addressed is “how do ecological interactions influence patterns of codiversification?”. We focus on the coevolution of interacting species, particularly those involving external parasites that live on hosts. Such parasites include a diverse assemblage of organisms, ranging from herbivorous insects on plants, to monogenean worms on fish, to feather lice on birds. Ectoparasites are powerful models for studies of coevolution because they are easy to observe, mark, and count. Many of the examples in the book involve parasitic lice of birds and mammals. Lice and their hosts are unusually tractable systems for studies that attempt to integrate coevolutionary ecology and history. Some chapters in the book are very broad in scope, introducing coevolutionary concepts that apply to all interacting species. Other chapters are more narrowly focused on the biology and coevolution of lice and their hosts. The overall goal of the book is to integrate coevolutionary concepts with examples of empirical tests of coevolutionary theory in micro- and macro-evolutionary time. The book concludes with a framework for better integration of coadaptation and codiversification.

The hierarchical approach to evolution, emerged since the 1980s at the crossroads of paleobiology, genetics, and developmental biology, has grown into a unifying perspective on the natural world and today offers an operational framework to understand the way complex biological systems work and evolve. This volume, written by a multidisciplinary group of authoritative contributors, provides an integrated, comprehensive, cutting-edge introduction to the hierarchy theory of evolution. Part 1 clarifies the kinds of hierarchies, levels and relations that the hierarchical approach has outlined over decades of theoretical work. These foundational, terminological and epistemological issues lead to Part 2, devoted to exploring several evolutionary scales and their interactions, from genes and genomes, to organismal phenotype and development, to natural selection and individuality at multiple scales, to the evolving biosphere. Part 3 illustrates theoretically and empirically the interactions between the two main hierarchies of the theory – the ecological or economic hierarchy and the evolutionary or genealogical hierarchy – especially at macroevolutionary scale. The dual hierarchical framework re-conceptualizes pivotal notions such as speciation, niche, stasis and community, and provides insights into the macroevolutionary role of humanity. The editors, including Niles Eldredge one of the founders of hierarchy theory, guide the reader with introductions and linking sections to understand the internal logic and the historical importance of the hierarchical perspective, and its advantages compared to other unifying proposals in evolutionary biology. The hierarchical evolutionary theory is to be studied as a candidate research programme where different approaches and models can find their reciprocal relevance.

In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. The author of this book has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—he puts this theory into a much broader framework in this book, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. The book's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, the book suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post-neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis.

The origin of life is a hotly debated topic. The Christian Bible states that God created the heavens and the Earth, all in about seven days roughly six thousand years ago. This episode in Genesis departs markedly from scientific theories developed over the last two centuries, which hold that life appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago in the form of bacteria, followed by unicellular organisms half a millennia later. It is this version of genesis that is explored in this tale of life's origins and evolution. It elucidates three origins, or geneses, of life—bacteria, nucleated cells, and multicellular organisms—and shows how evolution has sculpted life to its current biodiversity through four main events—mutation, recombination, natural selection, and geologic cataclysm. As an ecologist who specializes in algae, the first organisms to colonize Earth, the author brings a novel voice to the history of biodiversity and emphasizes here the role of unions in organizing life. For example, the ingestion of some bacteria by other bacteria led to mitochondria that characterize animal and plant cells, and the chloroplasts of plant cells. As the author recounts, life's grandeur is a result of an evolutionary tendency toward sociality and solidarity. He suggests that it is our cohesion and collaboration that allows us to solve the environmental problems arising in the decades and centuries to come. The book is rooted in the science of evolution but enlivened with many illustrations from other disciplines and the arts.

Over the last several decades, mathematical models have become central to the study of social evolution, both in biology and the social sciences. But students in these disciplines often seriously lack the tools to understand them. A primer on behavioral modeling that includes both mathematics and evolutionary theory, this book aims to make the student and professional researcher in biology and the social sciences fully conversant in the language of the field. Teaching biological concepts from which models can be developed, the book introduces readers to many of the typical mathematical tools that are used to analyze evolutionary models and end each chapter with a set of problems that draw upon these techniques. The book equips behaviorists and evolutionary biologists with the mathematical knowledge to truly understand the models on which their research depends. Ultimately, the book's goal is to impart the fundamental concepts that underlie modern biological understandings of the evolution of behavior so that readers will be able to more fully appreciate journal articles and scientific literature, and start building models of their own.

The main purpose of this book is to present the message that when one looks at subindividual variability, a feature that was either unnoticed or taken as a nuisance turns into an opportunity for framing new questions, identifying novel biological mechanisms linking sessile plants and mobile choosy animals, and deepening the understanding of the ecological and evolutionary factors involved in plant–animal interactions. The chapters focus on what features vary among reiterated organs of the same plant, what the magnitude of such variation is in the different types of organs, and how it is temporally and spatially organized. A thesis is being developed that the multiplicity of homologous structures arising from plant modularity gives rise to a subindividual level of phenotypic differences among organs of the same plant involving a constellation of phenotypic traits, differences whose quantitative importance is often similar or even greater than that of phenotypic differences among individual means. The book attempts to highlight the existence of phenotypic variation at the subindividual scale that can have diverse ecological implications for the interaction between plants and the animals who use reiterated organs as food, including herbivores, flower visitors, frugivores, and seed predators.

This edited volume applies concepts and approaches from integrative organismal biology and evolutionary biology to a songbird genus, Junco. Among the most common and abundant groups of songbirds in North America, juncos exhibit stunning phenotypic diversity across their continent-wide range, and they have been the subject of numerous foundational studies in evolution, ecology, and animal behavior for nearly a century. Across its 14 co-authored chapters, the book synthesizes past, present, and future research programs on the role of hormones in life-history trade-offs, sex differences, and the evolution of behavior, as well as research on the junco as a model of avian diversification and speciation. The 19 contributing authors are biologists from 4 countries and 13 institutes or universities who share a keen interest in the junco because of its current and historical role in understanding evolutionary processes, the mechanisms underlying social behaviors, and how animals know when to breed and migrate. All of the contributors have conducted research on the junco, and collectively they provide diverse expertise in behavioral ecology, behavioral neuroendocrinology, biogeography, bird song, conservation biology, ecological genomics, migration biology, physiological ecology, quantitative genetics, seasonality, and urban ecology.  The volume is designed to appeal to scholarly audiences and serious amateurs.