Content area
Full text
CONSERVATION AND THE GENETICS OF POPULATIONS. Fred W. Allendorf and Gordon Luikart. 2006. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 1-4051-2145-9. 642 p. $69.95 (softcover). - To truly appreciate the magnitude of what iAllendorf and Luikart have accomplished with their recent publication of Conservation and the Genetics of Populations, it is necessary to consider just how far the field of biology has come in the last 70 years. While Darwin's (1859) seminal work provided the theoretical context to understand patterns of species diversity and examples of adaptation, it wasn't until 1937, when Dobzhansky published Genetics and the Origin of Species, that the synthesis of Mendelian genetics and systematics provided biologists with their first insights into the evolutionary processes that operate on genetic variation within natural populations to generate new species. Over the next decade, the fields of botany, zoology, paleontology, and systematics were fully integrated into a comprehensive view of the evolutionary process commonly referred to as the "modern synthesis" (Mayr and Provine, 1980). More recently, advances in molecular genetics have led to a renaissance in developmental biology and studies of "evo-devo:" a field that has dramatically increased our appreciation of the connection between genotype and phenotype (Carroll, 2005). Almost coincidentally, it was Aldo Leopold (1949) who first drew our attention to the impact that human actions have on natural ecosystems just when this clearer understanding of speciation was beginning to emerge.
While the intellectual origin of conservation genetics can be traced to Otto Frankel's (1974) landmark paper, Genetic conservation: our evolutionary responsibility, the field as a whole really has only emerged as a cohesive discipline in...