It is part of the ideology of science that it is an international enterprise, carried out by a community that knows no barriers of nation or culture. But the reality is somewhat different. Despite the best intentions of scientists to form a single community, unseparated by differences of national and political viewpoint, they are, in fact, separated by language. Scientific literature in German is not generally assimilated by French workers, nor that appearing in French by those whose native language is English. The problem appears to have become more severe since the last war, because the ascendance of the United States as the preeminent economic power led, in a time of big and expensive science, to a pre dominance of American scientific production and a growing tendency (at least among English-speakers) to regard English as the international language of science. International congresses and journals of world circulation have come more and more to take English as their standard or official language. As a result, students and scientific workers in the English speaking world have become more linguistically parochial than ever before and have been cut off from a considerable scientific literature. Population genetics has been no exception to the rule. The elegant and extremely innovative theoreticaI work of Malecot, for example, is only now being properly assimilated by population biologists outside France. It was therefore with some sense of frustration that I read Prof.

Various approaches have been developed to evaluate the consequences of spatial structure on evolution in subdivided populations. This book is both a review and new synthesis of several of these approaches, based on the theory of spatial genetic structure. François Rousset examines Sewall Wright's methods of analysis based on F-statistics, effective size, and diffusion approximation; coalescent arguments; William Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory; and approaches rooted in game theory and adaptive dynamics. Setting these in a framework that reveals their common features, he demonstrates how efficient tools developed within one approach can be applied to the others. Rousset not only revisits classical models but also presents new analyses of more recent topics, such as effective size in metapopulations. The book, most of which does not require fluency in advanced mathematics, includes a self-contained exposition of less easily accessible results. It is intended for advanced graduate students and researchers in evolutionary ecology and population genetics, and will also interest applied mathematicians working in probability theory as well as statisticians.

Providing an essential foundation for evolutionary theory, this comprehensive volume examines patterns of genetic variation within natural insect populations, and explores the underlying mechanisms that lead to the genetic divergence of coexisting organisms. In particular, the text investigates current research on finescale genetic structure in natural insect populations. Internationally renowned scientists offer a wealth of current information not previously published. Part I present case studies of adaptive genetic structure in natural insect populations, including a critical discussion of the strenghts and weaknesses of the experimental methods employed. Part II addresses the ecological mechanisms that produce adaptive genetic structure in natural insect populations. Part III describes how behavioral and life-history patterns influence genetic structure. Finally, Part IV combines theoretical and empirical approaches linking genetic structure at the population level with larger-scale patterns of variation, such as host race formation and speciation. This broad-ranging, interdisciplinary source of information supplies a thorough examination of the mechanisms that promote and impede genetic structure in natural insect populations. It is a book that will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students, and to researchers in the fields of ecology, evolution, insect and plant systems, entomology, and population genetics.

J. B. S. Haldane, R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright simultaneously, and largely independently, laid the foundations of population genetics and the mathematical theory of evolution. Hal dane was born on November 5, 1892. Although he primarily worked at the University College London (UCL), in 1957 he resigned from the UCL and joined the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (India) as a Research Professor. In celebration of his birth centenary, the Indian Statistical Institute organized an International Conference on Human Genetics from 15 to 19 December, 1992. The prime motive in holding this Conference was to bring together a group of scientists - geneticists, anthropologists, clinicians and statisticians - to evaluate the impact of Haldane's contributions to various areas of human genetics, and also to review recent developments in the subject. Session and lecture themes were so chosen that they covered areas theoretical and applied, classical and emerging. Speakers were then identified and invited to deliver lectures on these themes. Manuscripts of all invited presentations and a selected number of contributed presentations were considered for inclusion in this Proceed ings Volume. Each manuscript was reviewed by at least one Conference participant, which resulted in revision of several manuscripts and rejection of some. This volume is a collection of the manuscripts which have been 'accepted' after the review-process. The Conference began with the "J. B. S. Haldane Centenary Lecture" delivered by C. R. Rao.

At least since the 1940s neo-Darwinism has prevailed as the consensus view in the study of evolution. The mechanism of evolution in this view is natural selection leading to adaptation, working on a substrate of adapta tionally random mutations. As both the study of genetic variation in natural populations, and the study of the mathematical equations of selec tion are reckoned to a field called population genetics, population genetics came to form the core in the theory of evolution. So much so, that the fact that there is more to the theory of evolution than population genetics became somewhat obscured. The genetics of the evolutionary process, or the genetics of evolutionary change, came close to being all of evolutionary biology. In the last 10 years, this dominating position of population genetics within evolutionary biology has been challenged. In evolutionary ecology, optimization theory proved more useful than population genetics for interesting predictions, especially of life history strategies. From develop mental biology, constraints in development and the role of internal regula tion were emphasized. From paleobiology, a proposal was put forward to describe the fossil record and the evolutionary process as a series of punc tuated equilibria; thus exhorting population geneticists to give a plausible account of how such might come about. All these developments tend to obscure the central role of population genetics in evolutionary biology.

Tropical climates, which occur between 23°30'N and S latitude (Jacob 1988), encompass a wide variety of plant communities (Hartshorn 1983, 1988), many of which are diverse in their woody floras. Within this geographic region, temperature and the amount and seasonality of rainfall define habitat types (UNESCO 1978). The F AO has estimated that there 1 are about 19 million km of potentially forested area in the global tropics, of which 58% were estimated to still be in closed forest in the mid-1970s (Sommers 1976; UNESCO 1978). Of this potentially forested region, 42% is categorized as dry forest lifezone, 33% is tropical moist forest, and 25% is wet or rain forest (Lugo 1988). The species diversity of these tropical habitats is very high. Raven (1976, in Mooney 1988) estimated that 65% of the 250,000 or more plant species of the earth are found in tropical regions. Of this floristic assemblage, a large fraction are woody species. In the well-collected tropical moist forest of Barro Colorado Island, Panama, 39. 7% (481 of 1212 species) of the native phanerogams are woody, arborescent species (Croat 1978). Another 21. 9% are woody vines and lianas. Southeast Asian Dipterocarp forests may contain 120-200 species of trees per hectare (Whitmore 1984), and recent surveys in upper Amazonia re corded from 89 to 283 woody species ~ 10 cm dbh per hectare (Gentry 1988). Tropical communities thus represent a global woody flora of significant scope.

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 cooperation between theory and experiment. It also requires careful consideration of results obtained for organisms other than trees, in order to gain additional insights by comparing the results for trees with those for other organisms. Yet, the greatest challenge to population and ecological genetics probably originates from the fact that forests are very likely to be the most complex ecosystems of all, even in some cases where they are subject to intense management. This complexity, which equally comprises biotic and abiotic factors varying both in time and space, makes extremely high demands on the adaptational capacity and thus flexibility of the carriers of such an ecosystem. Longevity combined with immobility during the vegetative phase, however, appears to contradict the obvious necessity of adaptational flexibility in forest tree populations when compared with short lived and/or mobile organisms.