From the preface by Joel E. Cohen: "A century from now humanity will live in a managed - or mismanaged - global garden. We are debating the need to preserve tropical forests. Farming of the sea is providing an increasing part of our fish supply. We are beginning to control atmospheric emissions. In 100 years, we shall use novel farming practices and genetic engineering of bacteria to manipulate the methane production of rice fields. The continental shelf will be providing food, energy, possibly even living space. To make such intensive management possible will require massive improvements in...

The classical theory of natural selection, as developed by Fisher, Haldane, and 'Wright, and their followers, is in a sense a statistical theory. By and large the classical theory assumes that the underlying environment in which evolution transpires is both constant and stable - the theory is in this sense deterministic. In reality, on the other hand, nature is almost always changing and unstable. We do not yet possess a complete theory of natural selection in stochastic environ- ments. Perhaps it has been thought that such a theory is unimportant, or that it would be too difficult. Our own...

The volume contains papers presented at a symposium addressing the question of how the selective nature of harvesting of natural populations might causegenetic changes. Attention is focused on both theory and on data from experiments and real fish populations, with contributions from quantitative genetics, life-history theory, population genetics and fisheries. The volume opens with a review of harvesting induced changes in fish populations by Policansky and is followed by sixteen other papers split into four topics: selection differentials, reaction norms, selection responses and the...

These Proceedings have been assembled from papers presented at the Conference on Models of Biological Growth and Spread, held at the German Cancer Research Centre Heidelberg and at the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the University of Heidelberg, July 16-21, 1979. The main theme of the conference was the mathematical representation of biolog- ical populations with an underlying spatial structure. An important feature of such populations is that they and/or their individual com- ponents may interact with each other. Such interactions may be due to external disturbances, internal regulatory...

During the last 30 years, many chemical compounds that are active against tumors have been discovered or developed. At the same time, new methods of testing drugs for cancer therapy have evolved. nefore 1964, drug testing on animal tumors was directed to observation of the incfease in life span of the host after a single dose. A new approach, in which the effects of multiple doses on the proliferation kinetics of the tumor in vivo as well as of cell lines in vitro are investigated, has been outlined by Skipper and his co-workers in a series of papers beginning in 1964 (Skipper, Schabel and...

These notes are an extended version of lectures given in the Symposium on Mathematics and Development arranged by the School of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Khartoum, Sudan, in 1982. The purpose of the notes is to discuss some models for the transmission of tropical infections. This area of mathematical epidemiology has previously received only minor attention by mathematicians, but is now growing in importance. The term "hybrid model" is used to denote a model with both stochastic and deterministic ingredients. We describe how a hybrid model approach can be used to formulate...

These are the proceedings of the Second R. Yorque Workshop on Resource Management which took place in Ashland, Oregon on July 23-25, 1984. The purpose of the workshop is to provide an informal atmosphere for the discussion of resource assessment and management problems. Each participant presented a one hour morning talk; afternoons were reserved for informal chatting. The workshop was successful in stimulating ideas and interaction. The papers by R. Deriso, R. Hilborn and C. Walters all address the same basic issue, so they are lumped together. Other than that, the order to the papers in this...

One of my favorite quotes is from a letter of Charles Darwin (1887): I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is proof of earnestness, and that you do not form your opinions without undergoing labour of some kind. It is not clear if this private opinion of Darwin was one that he held to be absolutely true, or was one of those opinions that, as with most of us, coincides with our bad days, but is replaced with a more optimistic view on our good days. I hold the sense of the statement to be true in general, but not with...

A conference on "Some Mathematical Problems in Biology" was held at the University of Victoria, Victoria, B. C. , Canada, from May 7 - 10, 1973. The participants and invited speakers were mathematicians interested in problems of a biological nature, and scientists actively engaged in developing mathematical models in biological fields. One aim of the conference was to attempt to assess what the recent rapid growth of mathematical interaction with the biosciences has accomplished and may accomplish in the near future. The conference also aimed to expose the problems of communication bet~",een...

When we consider the main object of forestry, the tree, it immediately becomes clear why experimental population geneticists have been so hesitant in making this object a primary concern of their research. Trees are very long-living organisms with generation intervals frequently exceeding those of their investigators by multiples. They virtually exclude, therefore, application of the classical methods of population genetics since these are based on observing genetic structures over generations. This situation, where the limits set to observation are so severe, particularly requires close...