Mendel and mathematics

Abstract

The Mathematical Theory of Selection, Recombination and MutationBy Reinhard BurgerJohn Wiley & Sons, 2000. $105.00 hbk (409 pages)ISBN 0 471 98653 4Burger has written an outstanding book. As well as discussing selection, recombination and mutation, he explains how random drift interacts with these evolutionary forces. Thus, his book covers a large fraction of population genetics, the main exception being the neutral theory of molecular evolution. Although the book is primarily theoretical, it focuses on the biological issues and includes excellent concise summaries of our present empirical knowledge.The main concern of this book, and indeed of the field as a whole, is to understand the processes that maintain the abundant genetic variation that we observe for almost all traits and in almost all populations. Related questions follow from this central issue. How will a population respond to natural and artificial selection on quantitative variation? Have sex and recombination evolved because they facilitate natural selection?Such questions have been at the centre of evolutionary genetics since its beginning, a century ago. It is surprising that our exquisitely detailed understanding of genetic mechanisms gives us no solution to these questions, and shows no immediate prospect of doing so. Molecular biology has revealed phylogenetic relationships among species and among genes; it has provided ways of detecting selection on DNA sequence and on proteins; and it has shown how (at least in principle) phenotype is determined by genotype. But finding the effects of large numbers of individual genetic variations on phenotype and on fitness seems a distant prospect: plans to model whole cells appear wildly overambitious 1xModelling cellular behaviour. Endy, D. and Brent, R. Nature. 2001; 409: 391–396Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (278)See all