Over the last two decades, the study of speciation has expanded from a modest backwater of evolutionary biology
into a large and vigorous discipline. Thus, the literature on speciation, as well as the number of researchers
and students working in this area, has grown explosively. Despite these developments, there has been no book-length
treatment of speciation in many years. As a result, both the seasoned scholar and the newcomer to evolutionary
biology had no ready guide to the recent literature on speciation -- a body of work that is enormous, scattered,
and increasingly technical. Although several excellent symposium volumes have recently appeared, these collections
do not provide a unified, critical, and up-to-date overview of the field. Speciation is designed to fill this gap.
Aimed at professional biologists, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, Speciation covers both plants
and animals (the first book on this subject to do so), 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. The authors do not hesitate to take stands
on these and other controversial issues. This critical and scholarly book will be invaluable to researchers in
evolutionary biology and is also ideal for a graduate-level course on speciation.
Table of Contents
1 Species : reality and concepts
2 Studying speciation
3 Allopatric and parapatric speciation
4 Sympatric speciation
5 Ecological isolation
6 Behavioral and nonecological isolation
7 Postzygotic isolation
8 The genetics of postzygotic isolation
9 Polyploidy and hybrid speciation
10 Reinforcement
11 Selection versus drift
12 Speciation and macroevolution
Appendix A: Catalogue and critique of species concepts
