Over the past fifty years, the case-control method, and to a lesser extent its case-based variants, have become the most important tools for the investigator of health problems. The case control method is the study of persons with the disease and a suitable control group of persons who do not have the disease. The book helps readers address a number of general and specific questions dealing with the case-control and other case-based methods, including questions of how to design and implement a case-control study that minimizes biases, how to analyze the data to appropriately deal with...

It is my hope that this collection of reviews can be profitably read by all who are interested in evolutionary biology. However, I would like to specifically target it for two disparate groups of biologists seldom men- tioned in the same sentence, classical ichthyologists and molecular biologists. Since classical times, and perhaps even before, ichthyologists have stood in awe at the tremendous diversity of fishes. The bulk of effort in the field has always been directed toward understanding this diversity, i. e., extracting from it a coherent picture of evolutionary processes and lineages....

The microorganisms present on the earth today possess a vast range of metabolic activities and are often able to demonstrate their surprising versatility by gaining both new enzyme activities and new metabolic path- ways through mutations. It is generally assumed that the earliest micro- organisms were very limited in their metabolic abilities, but as time passed they gradually expanded their range of enzymatic activities and increased both their biosynthetic and catabolic capacity. It is also believed that these primitive microorganisms increased the amount of genetic material they possessed...

This volume in the Monographs in Evolutionary Biology series addresses issues that are part of an emerging area of research loosely called "mo- lecular evolution. " Its practitioners include both molecular biologists cu- rious about the evolutionary implications of their data and evolutionary biologists pushing their analyses to the molecular level. The union of these fields of molecular and organismal biology has been turbulent at times, and, as shall be seen, this dialectic has led to some very serious challenges to long-held notions about the role of natural selection in evolution and the...

Ecological and evolutionary genetics span many disciplines and virtually all levels of biological investigation, from the genetic information itself to the principles governing the complex organization of living things. The ideas and informa- tion generated by ecological and evolutionary genetics provide the substance for strong inferences on the origins, changes and patterns of structural and functional organization in bio- logical communi ties. It is the coordination of these ideas and thoughts that will provide the answers to many fundamental questions in biology. There is no doubt that...

George H. F. Nuttall pioneered the study of phylogeny through the ge- netically encoded sequence structures of proteins. His classic monograph, Blood Immllnity and Blood Relationship, was published in 1904. The findings described in this monograph testified that immunologic compar- isons of serum proteins could help reveal the phyletic relationships of primates and other animals. Although Nuttall had no way of knowing that a correspondence between the nucleotide sequences of genes and the amino acid sequences of proteins was the genetic basis for the immuno- logic specificities of animal...