Progress on the Origin of Species 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Book Review/Science in the Media Progress on the Origin of Species Douglas J. Futuyma D espite the biases that a single author inevitably brings to a subject, only one or a few closely interacting authors can bring coherence, synthesis, and vision to a broad and complex topic. A symposium volume just doesn’t do the job. Few topics in biology are as simultaneously encompassing, complex, and and conclude with incisive assessments of what they think we know and what remains uncertain or unexplored. Like Gavrilets, they offer a number of novel ideas or suggestions about how to proceed. Coyne and Orr have both worked mostly on speciation genetics in Drosophila, so it is hardly surprising that their treatment of speciation bears a strong genetic emphasis and draws heavily on Drosophila work (perforce, since this is almost the only source of evidence on some topics, such as the genetics of hybrid sterility and inviability). Even the most drosophilophobic readers, however, will be pleased by the extent to which Coyne and Orr have conscientiously scoured the literature on nonmodel animals and plants. hybrid sterility). They emphasized the role of ecological selection as a driving force in speciation, largely by extrapolation from the primacy of selectionist thinking that developed during the Synthesis. They accepted that natural selection can reinforce prezygotic isolation (i.e., lack of mating or zygote formation) between species and thereby reduce production of un?t hybrids, even if Mayr did not share Dobzhansky’s belief that this was the norm. Mayr combined selection with genetic drift in his theory of founder-effect speciation (divergence in populations founded by just a few individuals), which became widely accepted. (It became Eldredge and Gould’s [3] theoretical foundation for punctuated equilibrium nine years after Mayr’s book appeared.) Mayr and Grant wrote against a background that almost entirely lacked any controversial