BiblioVault - Books about Provine, William B.

Evolution

Selected Papers

Sewall Wright

University of Chicago Press, 1986

All of Sewall Wright's published papers on evolution up to 1950, and a few published later, are gathered in this volume. William Provine's introductions to each paper include pertinent references to related portions of Provine's Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology and Wright's four-volume masterwork, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations. By comparing the papers in this volume with the corresponding topics in the larger work, it is possible to determine the respects in which Wright extended, changed, or remained constant in his ideas over a period of sixty years.

Wright's shifting-balance theory of evolution, first conceived in 1925, has proved enormously useful in modern evolutionary biology. Wright's international prestige has never been higher than it is currently, and the time is ripe for a rereading of his seminal papers. These papers are not only historically important for understanding the period of the "evolutionary synthesis" of the 1930s and 1940s, but continue to be stimulating and useful to working evolutionary biologists today.

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The Evolutionary Synthesis

Perspectives on the Unification of Biology

Ernst Mayr

Harvard University Press, 1980

The Evolutionary Synthesis

Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, With a New Preface

Ernst Mayr

Harvard University Press

Biology was forged into a single, coherent science only within living memory. In this volume the thinkers responsible for the “modern synthesis” of evolutionary biology and genetics come together to analyze that remarkable event.

In a new Preface, Ernst Mayr calls attention to the fact that scientists in different biological disciplines varied considerably in their degree of acceptance of Darwin’s theories. Mayr shows us that these differences were played out in four separate periods: 1859 to 1899, 1900 to 1915, 1916 to 1936, and 1937 to 1947. He thus enables us to understand fully why the synthesis was necessary and why Darwin’s original theory—that evolutionary change is due to the combination of variation and selection—is as solid at the end of the twentieth century as it was in 1859.

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The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics

With a New Afterword

William B. Provine

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Tracing the development of population genetics through the writings of such luminaries as Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, William B. Provine sheds light on this complex field as well as its bearing on other branches of biology.

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Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology

William B. Provine

University of Chicago Press, 1986

"Provine's thorough and thoroughly admirable examination of Wright's life and influence, which is accompanied by a very useful collection of Wright's papers on evolution, is the best we have for any recent figure in evolutionary biology."—Joe Felsenstein, Nature

"In Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology . . . Provine has produced an intellectual biography which serves to chart in considerable detail both the life and work of one man and the history of evolutionary theory in the middle half of this century. Provine is admirably suited to his task. . . . The resulting book is clearly a labour of love which will be of great interest to those who have a mature interest in the history of evolutionary theory."-John Durant, ;ITimes Higher Education Supplement;X

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