The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four or five such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Colloquia are organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and discussions with a hundred or more researchers with an interest in the topic. Colloquia presentations are recorded and posted on the National Academy of Sciences Sackler colloquia website and published on CD-ROM. These Colloquia are made possible by a generous gift from Mrs. Jill Sackler, in memory of her husband, Arthur M. Sackler.

The nature of populations, races, subspecies, and species. Genetic basis of isolation. Origin of isolation - theoretical. Origin of isolation - experimental. The nature of the speciation process.

Over the last two decades, the study of speciation has expanded from a modest backwater of evolutionary biology into a large and vigorous discipline. Speciation is designed to provide a unified, critical and up-to-date overview of the field. Aimed at professional biologists, graduate students and advanced undergraduates, it covers both plants and animals and deals with all relevant areas of research, including biogeography, field work, systematics, theory, and genetic and molecular studies. It gives special emphasis to topics that are either controversial or the subject of active research, including sympatric speciation, reinforcement, the role of hybridization in speciation, the search for genes causing reproductive isolation, and mounting evidence for the role of natural and sexual selection in the origin of species.

There are few more emotive, or important, crops in the world than rice – the staple food for a huge proportion of the world’s population. This volume presents the latest results of research in crop improvement as well as in molecular and cellular activities in rice. It consists of 26 chapters and is divided into the following four sections: Genome-wide and genome-based research; Signal transduction and development; Evolution and ecology; Improvement of rice.

Presents new insights into speciation through an in-depth analysis of extraordinary chromosomal variation in one species written by leading experts.

This book offers exchanges between the fields of paleontology and zoology as patterns of biodiversity have long attracted the attention of both biologists and paleontologists. It covers the development of isolated island faunas, paleogeography and zoomorphology. The book shows that patterns are not always what they seem if looked at without a spatial or temporal reference.

With recent technological advances, vast quantities of genetic and genomic data are being generated at an ever-increasing pace. The explosion in access to data has transformed the field of evolutionary genetics. A thorough understanding of evolutionary principles is essential for making sense of this, but new skill sets are also needed to handle and analyze big data. This contemporary textbook covers all the major components of modern evolutionary genetics, carefully explaining fundamental processes such as mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, and speciation. It also draws on a rich literature of exciting and inspiring examples to demonstrate the diversity of evolutionary research, including an emphasis on how evolution and selection has shaped our own species. Practical experience is essential for developing an understanding of how to use genetic and genomic data to analyze and interpret results in meaningful ways. In addition to the main text, a series of online tutorials using the R language serves as an introduction to programming, statistics, and analysis. Indeed the R environment stands out as an ideal all-purpose source platform to handle and analyze such data. The book and its online materials take full advantage of the authors' own experience in working in a post-genomic revolution world, and introduces readers to the plethora of molecular and analytical methods that have only recently become available. Evolutionary Genetics is an advanced but accessible textbook aimed principally at students of various levels (from undergraduate to postgraduate) but also for researchers looking for an updated introduction to modern evolutionary biology and genetics.

The origin of species has fascinated both biologists and the general public since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Significant progress in understanding the process was achieved in the "modern synthesis," when Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and others reconciled Mendelian genetics with Darwin's natural selection. Although evolutionary biologists have developed significant new theory and data about speciation in the years since the modern synthesis, this book represents the first systematic attempt to summarize and generalize what mathematical models tell us about the dynamics of speciation. Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species presents both an overview of the forty years of previous theoretical research and the author's new results. Sergey Gavrilets uses a unified framework based on the notion of fitness landscapes introduced by Sewall Wright in 1932, generalizing this notion to explore the consequences of the huge dimensionality of fitness landscapes that correspond to biological systems. In contrast to previous theoretical work, which was based largely on numerical simulations, Gavrilets develops simple mathematical models that allow for analytical investigation and clear interpretation in biological terms. Covering controversial topics, including sympatric speciation and the effects of sexual conflict on speciation, this book builds for the first time a general, quantitative theory for the origin of species.

The origin of species, or speciation, the "mystery of mysteries", as Charles Darwin called it, is an issue at the very heart of evolutionary biology, critical to understanding the mechanisms behind the great diversity of life around us. This book is centred around three major research areas: (1) biodiversity patterns in relation to speciation scenarios; (2) mechanisms that produce pre- and postzygotic reproductive isolation and adaptive divergence; as well as (3) genetics, epigenetics, and genomics of speciation. Being a mishmash of new ideas, reviews, conventional and nonconventional case studies, this collection demonstrates more than anything how research can benefit from integration of traditionally divergent disciplines, such as biogeography, paleontology, taxonomy, molecular genetics, proteomics, and genomics.