Systematics and the Origin of Species

This volume is dedicated to celebrate Ernst Mayr’s 100th anniversary and to explore current knowledge concerning the origin of species. The book includes the 16 papers presented by distinguished evolutionists.

The papers are organized into sections covering the origins of species barriers, the processes of species divergence, the nature of species, the meaning of “species,” and genomic approaches for understanding diversity and speciation.

In 1942, Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists, published Systematics and the Origin of Species, a seminal book of the modern theory of evolution, where he advanced the significance of population variation in the understanding of evolutionary process and the origin of new species. Mayr formulated the transition from Linnaeus’s static species concept to the dynamic species concept of the modern theory of evolution and emphasized the species as a community of populations, the role of reproductive isolation, and the ecological interactions between species.

Contents
Preface
1 Introductory Essay: Systematics and the Future of Biology
Part I. THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES BARRIERS: 2 The Genetic Basis of Reproductive Isolation: Insights from Drosophila
3 Inter-Locus Antagonistic Coevolution as an Engine of Speciation: Assessment with Hemiclonal Analysis
4 Chromosome Speciation: Humans, Drosophila, and Mosquitoes
5 Developmental Plasticity and the Origin of Species Differences
Part II. DISCERNING RECENT DIVERGENCE: 6 Speciation in Birds: Genes, Geography, and Sexual Selection
7 Critical Review of Host Specificity and Its Coevolutionary Implications in the Fig/Fig-Wasp Mutualism
8 Evolutionary Animation: How Do Molecular Phylogenies Compare to Mayr’s Reconstruction of Speciation Patterns in the Sea?
9 Mayr, Dobzhansky, and Bush and the Complexities of Sympatric Speciation in Rhagoletis
10 On the Origin of Lake Malawi Cichlid Species: A Population Genetic Analysis of Divergence
Part III. THE NATURE OF SPECIES AND THE MEANING OF ‘‘SPECIES’’: 11 A Multidimensional Approach for Detecting Species Patterns in Malagasy Vertebrates
12 Examining Bacterial Species Under the Specter of Gene Transfer and Exchange
13 Ernst Mayr and the Modern Concept of Species
Part IV. GENOMIC APPROACHES AND NEW INSIGHTS ON DIVERSITY: 14 Decoding the Genomic Tree of Life
15 Prospects for Identifying Functional Variation Across the Genome
16 Genetics and Genomics of Drosophila Mating Behavior
17 Genomes, Phylogeny, and Evolutionary Systems Biology
Index