BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Abstract

Speciation. Modes of speciation. Mechanisms, hybrid zones, isolating mechanisms, reinforcement .... These words, and many others associated with speciation research, often bring fear and loathing to practicing evolutionary biologists, and certainly to those of us who try to teach evolution at the undergraduate level. The reason for this is partly the material (speciation really is complicated), and partly that no one seems able to agree even on the terminology associated with speciation, let alone the proper way to study the process. For example, I often find myself using the Biological Species Concept in a classroom situation, dreading the inevitable But what if the two taxa don't occur in sympatry? True, one can fall back on morphospecies operational definitions, or cladistic concepts of definable monophyletic taxa, but none of these are wholly satisfying, either to me or the class. Ultimately, I often find myself simply saying that there are a lot of opinions, little resolution, and several ways of looking at the problem, and moving on before anyone gets even more frustrated. Which is a lousy way to deal with the topic that was of primary concern to Darwin, and has been a central focus of evolutionary biology ever since. In late 1987, a symposium was organized at the Academy of Natural Sciences to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Academy. The topic of concern was speciation, and this volume, edited by Otte and Endler, contains 25 contributions covering the spectrum of speciation topics. I wasn't able to attend the symposium, but based on this book, I wish I had. It must have been wild. The book is loosely organized into seven parts; Concepts of Species, Genetic Structure of Species Boundaries, Effects of Population Structure on Speciation, two parts on the Biogeography and Ecology of Speciation (one section on Background and Theory, and one on Empirical Studies), and Evolutionary Consequences of Speciation. The seventh part is a concluding chapter on Conceptual and Other Problems in Speciation, where Endler sums up the conference. However, as the editors admit in the Preface, the organization is somewhat arbitrary in that the authors wrote what they thought would be most interesting and we arranged them into groups afterwards. In essence, this book is really an eclectic collection of papers by 37 of the more interesting practitioners in evolutionary biology, providing either a review of recent results, or their philo-