Customer Reviews

Speciation

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this book for a cross-disciplinary seminar on Speciation. I was the lone plant biologist in the group. I was not deterred. After all, Darwin was a botanist and some of the most intriguing work in evolution has focused on plants. Since G. Ledyard Stebbins wrote Variation and Evolution in Plants in 1949, there is concensus (I think) that plants--perhaps together with bdelloid rotifers--are what make the "species problem" such a problem. With visions of Taraxacum and Rubus and other such deliciously vexing groups running through my mind, I dove in with gusto. What did I find? Flies, flies, flies and more flies! Dobzhansky would be proud. Such an incredible diversity of plant topics that might have been brought to the table were simply overlooked, ignored, or--as I began to suspect further in--simply not understood. I found myself writing the same note over and over in the margin, "yes, but this isn't true of plants". The authors do admit early on that the book is Drosophila-rich, but this is no excuse for not expanding to include other relevant biological systems here.

Coyne and Orr are married to the biological species concept and flat out don't believe in sympatric speciation. If one was actually to apply their "modified" version of the BSC to plants, the taxonomy of plants as we understand it today would collapse. And if you hold any hope that sympatric speciation might be possible, Coyne and Orr will beat those fantasies out of you. In fact, their distaste for the topic borders on fanaticism. By the latter chapters, I found myself rolling my eyes each time sympatry was discussed. Enough!

That said, Speciation is still a solid text on the topic and an excellent introduction for advanced undergrads or grad students. Coyne and Orr do an exceptional job discussing the merits and drawbacks of various research approaches, and do provide suggestions for moving forward. I actually highly recommend this text because I think it introduces concepts well and thoroughly, with the caveat that it is bound to frustrate those working with plants, or asexual taxa of any sort.

i bought this book for a class on speciation. however, as a botanist i was somewhat disappointed to find 70% of the papers cited throughout the book related only to drosophila. coyne and orr's personal research deals only with drosophila so this seems like their bias on display. they also use superlatives more often in relation to their own work than anyone else's. though it's a harmless habit, it can become annoying and detract from the rest of the content of the book. the book is a probably the best review of major developments in our understanding of speciation in the past several decades, but it isn't perfect.

This is an excelent book for anyone interested in the processes of speciation. The book is written so that an advanced undergraduate can understand it, but a proffessor of evolution can still get insight from it. Theories of speciation are well laid out and discussed in-debth. A excelent addition for any professional book collection.

This is an excellent book for pretty much any biologist. It is true that many of the chapters (especially those about postzygotic isolation) have many examples of flies, but it is because some the best examples come from Drosophila. I highly recommend this book.

I'm not professional in this field so it is a little difficult for me to follow the writing style.

Maybe it is a good book for experts, but hard to follow for outsider who just wants an introduction to speciation.

I felt like this book had a well planned and consistent lay out from start to finish. The authors present a topic then discuss competing theories and then provide both experimental and field data that may support or refute the different theories. Most of the research that is mentioned is only mentioned in passing but at least it gives you a place to start. On the whole I felt like it was a good introduction to the science of speciation.

This is the most up-to-date book in the field of speciation. It is comprehensive in theory, data, and taxa, but by no means comprehensive of the biology: that may be more a fault of the field and the topic than the book. Tons of references and suggestions for research programs.

I was expecting a review of speciation, particularly the type as seen in the fossil record which shows the origin of evolutionary novelties. However, the only speciation recognized in this book is variation that affects reproduction. A few mutations in a few genes increase variation within a species, and sometimes that variation affects reproduction.

Recent studies have shown that speciation which introduces evolutionary novelties requires many changes to many genes, totalling some thousands of changes, but that was not mentioned. The section on macroevolution discussed the persistence of species, on the order of 1 to several million years, but they failed to comment on the implications of millions of years with no changes, followed in a very short time with a new species in the fossil record, fully changed with thousands of base changes. No source for those thousands of changes is mentioned.

Dude, amazon asked me to review this book... an invited review of Coyne and Orr's "_SPECIATION_" for my CV... Booyah!!
This book is good news for anyone interested in speciation, and brainstorming material for any biologist who's willing to consider an evolutionary approach to his/her system or model or whatever.
It would be a frustratingly difficult read for a non-biologist.