Book reviewed in this article: Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. By R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin.

Phylogenetic information is often necessary to distinguish between evolutionary scenarios. Recently, some prominent proponents of evolutionary psychology have acknowledged this, and have claimed that such evidence has in fact been brought to bear on adaptive hypotheses involving complex human psychological traits. Were this possible, it would be a valuable source of evidence regarding hypothesized adaptive traits in humans. However, the structure of the Hominidae family makes this difficult or impossible. For many traits of interest, the closest extant relatives to the (...) human species are too phenotypically different from humans for such methods to provide meaningful data. While phylogenetic information can be useful for testing adaptive hypotheses in humans, these generally involve traits that are (a) not widely shared in the species or (b) fairly widely shared in the Hominidae family, and hence likely of a lower order of complexity than the sorts of traits evolutionary psychology has so far been interested in. (shrink)

We attempt to improve the understanding of the notion of agene being `for a phenotypic trait or traits. Considering theimplicit functional ascription of one thing being `for another,we submit a more restrictive version of `gene for talk.Accordingly, genes are only to be thought of as being forphenotypic traits when good evidence is available that thepresence or prevalence of the gene in a population is the resultof natural selection on that particular trait, and that theassociation between that trait and the gene (...) in question isdemonstrably causal. It is therefore necessary to gatherstatistical, biochemical, historical, as well as ecologicalinformation before properly claiming that a gene is for aphenotypic trait. Instead of hampering practical use of the `genefor talk, our approach aims at stimulating much needed researchinto the functional ecology and comparative evolutionary biologyof gene action. (shrink)

In the ongoing debate concerning the nature of human racial categories, there is a trend to reject the biological reality of race in favour of the view that races are social constructs. At work here is the assumption that biological reality and social constructivism are incompatible. I oppose the trend and the assumption by arguing that cladism, in conjunction with current work in human evolution, provides a new way to define race biologically. Defining race in this way makes sense when (...) compared to the developments in other areas of systematic biology, where shared history has largely replaced morphological similarity as the foundation of a natural biological classification. Surprisingly, it turns out that cladistic races and social constructivism are compatible. I discuss a number of lessons about the way human biological races have been conceptualized. (shrink)

Part I: History 1. Origins: A Brief History of Research on Speciation, Stewart H. Berlocher Part II: Species Concepts 2. Linking Evolutionary Pattern and Process: The Relevance of Species Concepts for the Study of Speciation, Richard G. Harrison 3. Species and Speciation: Geography, Population Structure, Ecology, and Gene Trees, Alan R. Templeton 4. Species and the Diversity of Natural Groups, Kerry L. Shaw 5. The General Lineage Concept of Species, Species Criteria, and the Process of Speciation: A Conceptual Unification and (...) Terminological Recommendations, Kevin de Queiroz Part III: Geography, Ecology, and Population Structure 6. Theory and Models of Sympatric Speciation, Paul A. Johnson and Urban Gullberg 7. On the Sympatric Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Alexey S. Kondrashov, Lev Yu. Yampolsky, and Svetlana A. Shabalina 8. Can Symatric Speciation via Host of Habitat Shift be Proven from Phylogenetic and Biogeographic Evidence?, Steward H. Berlocher 9. Ecological Causes of Speciation, Dolph Schluter 10. The Apple Maggot Fly, Rhagoletis Pomonella: Flies in the Face of Conventional Wisdom about Speciation, Jeffrey L. Feder 11. Evolution of Insect-Plant Associations: Sensory Perception and Receptor Modifications Direct Food Specialization and Host Shifts in Phytophagous Insects, Steph B. J. Menkin and P. Roessignh 12. The Evolution of Edaphic Endemics, Mark R. Macnair and Mike Gardner 13. The Relative Rate of Sympatric and Allopatric Speciation in Fishes: Tests Using DNA Sequence Divergence between Sister Species and among Clades, Amy R. McCune and Nathan R. Lovejoy 14. The First Stage of Speciation as Seen in Organisms Separated by the Isthmus of Panama, H.A. Lessios 15. Rivers, Refuges, and Ridges: The Geography of Speciation of Amazonian Mammals, James L. Patton and Maria Nazareth F. da Silva Part IV: Reproductive Barriers 16. Songs, Preproductive Isolation, and Speciation in Cryptic Species of Insects: A Case Study Using Green Lacewings, Marta Martinez Wells and Charles S. Henry 17. Reproductive Isolation in Sonoran Desert Drosophila: Testing the Limits of the Rules, Therese Ann Markow and Gregory D. Hocutt 18. Wolbachia and Speciation, John H. Werren 19. Intergenomic Conflict, Interlocus Antagonistic Coevolution, and he Evolution of Reproductive Isolation, William R. Rice 20. Species Formation and the Evolution of Gamete Recognition Loci, Stephen R. Palumbi 21. The Evolution of Barriers to Fertilization Between Closely Related Organisms, Daniel J. Howard, Marta Reece, Pamela G. Gregory, Jiming Chu, Michael L. Cain Part V: The Genetics of Speciation 22. The Genetics of Sexual Isolation, Michael G. Ritchie and Stephen D. F. Phillips 23. Sex Linkage and Speciation in Lepidoptera, Dorothy Pashley Prowell 24. The Role of Chromosomal Change in Speciation, Franco Spirito 25. The Genetics of Hybrid Male Sterility in Drosophila, Horacio Fachal Naveira and Xulio Rodriguez Maside 26. Subtle is Nature: The Genetics of Species Differentiation and Speciation, Chung-I Wu and Hope Hollocher 27. The Genetics of Speciation: Promises and Prospects of Quantitative Trait Locus Mapping, Sara Via and David J. Hawthorne Part VI: Hybrid Zones and Speciation 28. What Do Hybrid Zones in General, and the Chorthippus parallelus Zone in Particular, Tell Us about Speciation?, Roger Butlin 29. Paradigm Lost Natural Hubridization and Evolutionary Innovations, Machael L. Arnold and Simon K. Emms 30. Mimicry and Warning Color at the Boundary Between Races and Species, James Mallet, W. Owen McMillan, and Chris D. Jiggins 31. Hybridization and Speciation in Darwin’s Finches: The Role of Sexual Imprinting on a Culturally Transmitted Trait, B. Rosemary Grant and Peter R. Grant Part VII: Perspectives 32. The Conceptual Radicalization of an Evolutionary Biologist, Guy L. Bush 33. Unanswered Questions and Future Directions in the Study of Speciation, Daniel J. Howard. (shrink)

Phenotypic Evolution explicitly recognizes organisms as complex genetic-epigenetic systems developing in response to changing internal and external environments. As a key to a better understanding of how phenotypes evolve, the authors have developed a framework that centers on the concept of the Developmental Reaction Norm. This encompasses their views: (1) that organisms are better considered as integrated units than as disconnected parts (allometry and phenotypic integration); (2) that an understanding of ontogeny is vital for evaluating evolution of adult forms (ontogenetic (...) trajectories, epigenetics, and constraints); and (3) that environmental heterogeneity is ubiquitous and must be acknowledged for its pervasive role in phenotypic expression. (shrink)