Customer Reviews

Mathematical Population Genetics

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This is *the* classical text of the foundations of theoretical population genetics. It shouldn't be your first exposure to the field, but if you want to fully understand how allele frequencies in a gene pool change over time, this is where you'll find it nailed down.

I have been looking for a book that explains the mathematics of population genetics. Unfortunately, Mathematical Population Genetics is not properly a mathematics book and so has failed to satisfy my needs, despite two attempts at reading it. The book is a desert of equations, with no definitions, theorems, lemmas, corollaries, or proofs. The organization is confusing, as is much of the text. There is no underlying mathematical theory or set of mathematical techniques that is being properly presented, so it all seems very ad hoc. Many steps in derivations are omitted, so it is easy to be confused about what the author means or to lose the thread of the derivation. Genetic and population genetic terminology is used without definition, so the book is not suited to learning about population genetics without prior background. The author also spends a great deal of time explicating the history and controversies of the field. This kind of material is distracting and better left to a section at the end of each chapter or a chapter at the end. As it was for me, the book will be a disappointment for mathematically sophisticated readers.