دانلود کتاب Evolution: Selected Papers

I have designed this volume as a companion to "Sewall Wright and EvolutionaryBiology" and to Wright's four-volume treatise, "Evolution and the Geneticsof Populations". In his treatise, Wright constantly referred to his earlierpublications on evolutionary biology. He did not, however, simply summarizethese papers, but instead generally began his discussion from where theyleft off. Much of Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (hereafter referredto as SW&EB) is devoted to an analysis of the background and content ofWright's papers on evolutionary biology. Thus a volume containing a judiciousselection of his published papers on evolutionary biology would be avery useful companion to these two works. Wright is one of the most influentialevolutionary biologists of the twentieth century, and this volume mightalso be useful for those merely wishing to have a collection of his papers onthat subject.Another compelling reason for publishing a volume of Wright's papers,especially those before about 1950, is that they were little understood at thetime of publication, even if widely read. Still Wright enjoyed much prestige asa quantitative population geneticist. The primary reasons for this curioussituation are easily seen. Evolutionary biologists in general had very littletraining in mathematics or specifically in statistics, or in quantitative reasoninggenerally. Moreover, Wright was rather insensitive to the inability of hisaudience to follow his quantitative reasoning. Even those with some mathematicaltraining had much difficulty following Wright's idiosyncratic methodof path coefficients. Inability to read much more than his introductions andconclusions did not, however, prevent many evolutionists from admiringWright's quantitative work. As Ernst Mayr and John A. Moore have pointedout on many occasions in letters to me, evolutionary biologists were extremelysusceptible to the attractions of quantitative models whose derivationsthey could not understand. [...]Included in this volume are all of Wright's published papers on evolutionarybiology up to 1950 and a selection of those published after that, includingtwo important papers published after the last volume of his treatise (1978; thetreatise is hereafter referred to as E&GP). I have included all of the earlierpapers because in SW&EB most of my discussion of Wright's publishedpapers concerns the period before 1950; the papers published after 1950 tendto be repetitious of earlier papers or of the later treatise and, being older, theearlier papers are more difficult to locate. I have excluded from this categoryonly the five papers that Wright wrote in collaboration with TheodosiusDobzhansky and published in Dobzhansky's famous series, "The Genetics ofNatural Populations," which has recently been republished in its entirety withextensive introductions (Lewontin et al. 1981). I included the two very recentpapers because one is Wright's own account of the origins of his shiftingbalance theory of evolution in nature and the other his analysis of speciationand the theory of punctuated equilibrium, popularized by Niles Eldredge andStephen Jay Gould (Eldredge and Gould 1972). Wright received more requestsfor reprints of this last paper than any other he ever published (he wasninety-two when it appeared in print).There was another reason for this pattern of selection of the papers.Continuity versus change is a fundamental theme in the development of anindividual scientist's thought and influence. This theme is especially importantin Wright's case because he has strongly emphasized the continuity in histhinking about mechanisms of evolution from the mid-1920s to the present.While agreeing with Wright that his thought about evolution has been inmany ways remarkably consistent over the years, I argue in SW&EB that insome crucial ways he changed his mind about the mechanisms of evolution,especially concerning the problem of adaptation in relation to random driftand selection. By presenting Wright's papers on evolution in their entirety upto 1950, a comparison of his earlier and later views is possible simply byexamining this volume and his E&GP, an exercise that I warmly recommendto anyone interested in the development of Wright's views and their influencein evolutionary biology.Both this introduction and those for the individual papers are very briefbecause most of the historical background is already in SW&EB; later extensionsof the papers are detailed in E&GP. Thus aside from the barestinformation about each paper, the primary purpose of the introductions is torefer the reader to the pertinent sections of SW&EB and E&GP, where oftenextensive background may be found.With a few exceptions, the order of presentation of papers in this volume ischronological. For obvious reasons, I have placed first Wright's 1978 paper onthe origins of his shifting balance theory. Otherwise, the only departure fromstrict chronological order comes when papers sharing a basic theme areintroduced together, as in the case of Wright's three papers on isolation bydistance.All but a few of the papers in this volume were photocopied from reprintsthat Wright sent out to other biologists. Occasional typesetting errorsappeared in the published journals, and Wright corrected these by hand in thereprints he sent to others. Wright's corrections thus appear in these photocopies.The print quality of the original reprints from which the reproductionsare taken varies considerably. Many academic journals in the first half of thecentury operated on minimal budgets; low-quality print was one way to savemoney. Every effort has been made in this volume to maintain the highestquality in photo reproduction. The variation in the results is therefore afunction of variation in the originals. The advantages to scholars of having theoriginals is enormous, well worth the cost of some variation in print quality.Sewall Wright deserves the credit for this volume. He wrote all of thepapers and told me about the origins of each one. He also wrote a detailedcritique of the draft version of my introductions to the papers. Our conversationsabout the background of the papers are recorded on audiotape (and arepartially transcribed) and are available at the Library of the American PhilosophicalSociety. [...][From the Preface]