After volume 33, this book series was replaced by the journal "Evolutionary Biology." Please visit www.springer.com/11692 for further information.

This latest volume continues the series' focus on critical reviews, commentaries, original papers, and controversies in the field of evolutionary biology.

After volume 33, this book series was replaced by the journal "Evolutionary Biology." Please visit www.springer.com/11692 for further information.

This volume continues bringing to readers the findings of eminent evolutionary biologists and paleobiologists. Among the topics discussed in this book are the origin of the dermal skeleton in conodont chordates, patterns of nucleotide substitution and codon usage in plasmid DNA evolution, a model to explain phenotype stability in functional systems, and inter-island speciation of Hawaiian biota.

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...