Phylogeography: The History and Formation of Species

Abstract

Phylogeography: The History and Formation of Species. John C. Avise. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000, viii + 447 pp., $49.95, (ISBN 0-674-66638-0). Breakthroughs in DNA sequencing technology in the 1980's revolutionized evolutionary biology, and out of this revolution emerged what has become a highly influential discipline known as phylogeography. Formally introduced a little more than a decade ago by John Avise and his colleagues (Avise et al., 1987), phylogeography is a highly integrative approach used to investigate the relationship between earth history, ecology, and biotic diversification. Phylogeography combines information from population genetics, phylogenetics, geoclimatic history, paleontology, population biology, molecular evolution, and historical biogeography in order to characterize the geographic distributions of genealogical lineages across the geographic landscape (referred to as phylogeographic patterns), and to infer the evolutionary, demographic and biogeographic processes that have shaped these patterns. In this book, Avise provides an overview of the historical development of phylogeography, from its early stages when animal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was used (almost exclusively) to examine phylogeographic patterns within single species, to today, when an increasingly wider range of additional molecular markers are being used to compare phylogeographic patterns among co-distributed taxa (comparative phylogeography). As the principle founder of the field, no one is better qualified to write a book recounting the history of phylogeography, and Avise excels at providing …