The Adaptive Landscape in Evolutionary Biology

The 'Adaptive Landscape' has been a central concept in population genetics and evolutionary biology since this powerful metaphor was first formulated by Sewall Wright in 1932. Eighty years later, it has become a central framework in evolutionary quantitative genetics, selection studies in natural populations, and in studies of ecological speciation and adaptive radiations. Recently, the simple concept of adaptive landscapes in two dimensions (genes or traits) has been criticized and several new and more sophisticated versions of the original adaptive landscape evolutionary model have been developed in response. No published volume has yet critically discussed the past, present state, and future prospect of the adaptive landscape in evolutionary biology. This volume brings together prominent historians of science, philosophers, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists, with the aim of discussing the state of the art of the Adaptive Landscape from several different perspectives.

Erik Svensson is professor in evolutionary ecology at Lund University Sweden. He obtained his PhD in 1997, and has performed research in Sweden, California, Greece, South Africa, and Japan on several different organismal groups, including birds, reptiles, crustaceans, and insects. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz and a visiting Fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. Svensson's research interests are evolutionary processes in natural populations, including interactions between natural and sexual selection, life-history biology, genetic polymorphisms and frequency-dependent selection, mate preference evolution, sexual isolation, and speciation processes. He has published about 70 articles in international journals, and he currently serves in the international boards of American Naturalist and Evolution. He is currently member of the governing council for the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. Ryan Calsbeek is a former post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Tropical Research at University of California, Los Angeles, a visiting scholar at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, and a visiting professor at Piere and Marie Curie Universite in Paris, France. Calsbeek's research focuses on the ecological and evolutionary factors that influence the strength and form of natural selection in natural populations of reptiles and amphibians, including predation, competition, and conflicts between the sexes. He is currently an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College in the U.S.A. Clasbeek has published 50 articles in international peer-reviewed journals and currently serves as an Associate Editor on the journal Functional Ecology.