Customer Reviews

Evolutionary Theory

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I would reckon that few people are actually qualified to review this excellent book, including myself--I certainly don't have the necessary mathematical background. Nevertheless, I was surprised that no one has reviewed it yet, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

Put simply, Rice's book is easily(!) one of the best texts written on evolutionary theory. It is a book that truly encompasses all the relevant aspects pertaining to the mechanics of evolutionary change. A lot books that claim to deal with "evolutionary theory" are actually either population genetics texts, tomes on macroevolution, or sleekly packaged books on Evo-devo. Rice's book, on the other hand, includes population/quantitative genetics, but also chapters on game theory, evolution of development, and multi-level selection. These chapters, as well as a chapter on Price's Theorem, set this book apart from all others.

There is a hefty dose of equations in this text, but unlike other books, the equations are skillfully integrated into explaining a particular topic. In fact, the main thrust of this text is to take some foundational concepts in evolutionary theory and to make them accessible to quasi-motivated people. Rice does this, not by re-hashing standard derivations found elsewhere, but by providing first a brief verbal description of the concept and then going through the necessary mathematical steps that show how a particular set of equations were derived. This nuts-and-bolts approach is remarkably effective and doesn't bring on the eyelid fatigue that so many other books do. Rice doesn't shy away from complex topics but tackles them with the same pithy straightforwardness as more simple topics. In particular, the sections on effective population size, diffusion theory, continuous strategy games, and Hamilton's rule are quite well done.

For a book that is full of equations, Rice's writing style is remarkably disarming. His words have a resolute efficiency about them. There's nothing arcane about this book and his prose is about as far away as you can get from the prose in Gould's big book. That said, Rice's colloquial style shouldn't be confused with simplicity or superficiality--quite the contrary, there are some deep but crisp discussions on the philosophy of model-building, multilevel selection, and assumptions of game theory. The clarity with which things are presented in this book make them all look so easy in retrospect.

Novel derivations (at least novel to me) abound in this book. They include: a new way to derive Hamilton's rule from the Price theorem (which I think is different from Hamilton's 75 paper as well as Queller's); a genetical model of species selection; a way to conceptualize drift as "random covariance" (which shows why a non-zero covariance between fitness and phenotype is not evidence of selection--causal arguments are needed as well); an incorporation of the drift term (from diffusion theory) into game-theoretic models with finite populations; a demonstration of how seemingly independent cases of one/two/multi locus selection are special cases of the Price theorem; and an entirely novel chapter on the mathematics of developmental evolution (which outlines and expands on Rice's earlier phenotype landscape work, including a section on the evolution of reaction norms). There are probably more.

I should note that Rice's book doesn't deal with systematics or speciation. Nevertheless, Felsenstein's recent book (get the latest printing!) and Coyne/Orr's recent book deal with these topics. If you understood the contents of all three of these books, you'd be seriously well-versed in evolutionary theory.

Rice's book is industrial-strength. Buy it and it will scour away the semantic veneer of your knowledge only to reveal the shiny mathematical structure of evolutionary change that lies beneath.

At first glance Dr. Rice's book appears to be a somewhat generic introduction to population genetic theory. The first few chapters, which lay out the basic selection- at-one-or-two-loci seemingly required of all such texts, are written clearly, but nonetheless seem basically interchangeable with most other discussions of the topic. In my opinion, however, Rice's brilliance really shows through in the subsequent chapters, in particular his exposition of the Price Equation (presented in chapter 6). Here, Rice presents arguments and explanations of the fundamentals of the evolutionary process that I found unique, easy to follow, and full of deep insight. The mathematics require nothing more than algebra, but nonetheless the concepts really influenced my way of thinking about evolution.
The later chapters deal with several specific issues (developmental evolution, multilevel selection, etc), and sometimes require fairly advanced mathematics (eg. tensor analysis). The chapter on multilevel selection provides a fairly clear introduction to using the Price Equation to actually solve population genetic problems.
The text is fairly short, and some sections don't get the attention they deserve (particularly on coalescent theory). Nonetheless, the clearly presented introductory material, combined with the deep insight offered by some of the later chapters, should make this book of interest to both early graduate students as well as population genetics mavens.

This book is an extremely well-written and accessible resource. As mentioned in a previous review, each subject receives mathematically detailed treatment (without getting bogged down in irrelevant detail) along with intuitive explanations of the biological meaning and behavior of the math. It therefore provides plenty of useful material for readers with diverse backgrounds. The book benefits from a focus and clarity that proves painfully absent in many other science texts, and it is deceptively short as a result. Page for page, this text packs in far more comprehensible content than any other on my shelf.

This is a fantastic book and will be a classic in evolutionary biology for decades to come. Rice has perhaps a unique ability to explain complex topics in a way that makes then accessible to a wide audience. He also has a special talent for identifying unifying themes that demonstrates the connections between various evolutionary processes. Every evolutionary biologist needs a copy of this book.