The Adaptive Landscape in Evolutionary Biology

Jonathan Michael Kaplan, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Svensson and Calsbeek remain upbeat regarding both the current usefulness and the future of adaptive landscapes, the collection theyve put together certainly provides more than enough reason for that kind of optimism

John Hopkins, Bulletin of the British Ecological Society There can be few ideas in biology which have retained such heuristic value and challenge to theoreticians and researchers over such a long time period. Svensson and Calsbeek have drawn together authors from the diverse research areas which continue to draw inspiration from the adaptive landscape.

<br>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. <br>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.<br>

Preface; PART I: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES; 1. A Shifting Terrain: A Brief History of the Adaptive Landscape; 2. Sewall Wright's Adaptive Landscape: Philosophical Reflections on Heuristic Value; 3. Landscapes, Surfaces and Morphospaces: What are they good for?; PART II: CONTROVERSIES: FISHER'S FUNDAMENTAL THEORY VERSUS SEWALL WRIGHT'S SHIFTING BALANCE THEORY; 4. Wright's Adaptive Landscape versus Fisher's Fundamental Theorem; 5. Wright's Adaptive Landscape: Testing the Predictions of his Shifting Balance Theory; 6. Wright's Shifting Balance Theory and Factors Affecting the Probability of Peak Shifts; PART III: APPLICATIONS: MICROEVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS, QUANTITATIVE GENETICS, AND POPULATION BIOLOGY; 7. Fluctuating Selection and Dynamic Adaptive Landscapes; 8. The Adaptive Landscape in Sexual Selection Research; 9. Analysing and Comparing the Geometry of Individual Fitness Surfaces; 10. Adaptive Accuracy and Adaptive Landscapes; 11. Empirical Insights into Adaptive Landscapes from Bacterial Experimental Evolution; 12. How Humans Influence Evolution on Adaptive Landscapes; PART IV: SPECIATION AND MACROEVOLUTION; 13. Adaptive Landscapes and Macroevolutionary Dynamics; 14. Adaptive Dynamics: a Framework for Modelling the Long-Term Evolutionary Dynamics of Quantitative Traits; 15. Adaptive Landscapes, Evolution, and the Fossil Record; PART V: DEVELOPMENT, FORM, AND FUNCTION; 16. Mimicry, Saltational Evolution, and the Crossing of Fitness Valleys; 17. High-dimensional Adaptive Landscapes Facilitate Evolutionary Innovation; 18. Phenotype Landscapes, Adaptive Landscapes, and the Evolution of Development; PART VI: CONCLUDING REMARKS; 19. The Past, the Present, and the Future of the Adaptive Landscape; Index