Description
Professor Falconer provides a synthesis of much theoretical and experimental work not hitherto available in one volume. It fills a widely felt need for a not too advanced text-book developing the subject from first principles and covering all its major aspects without going deeply into inessential details or controversial topics.
Though much of the reasoning is necessarily mathematical in nature, the author has sought to make both the reasoning and the conclusions intelligible to biologists equipped with only an elementary knowledge of algebra, statistics, and Mendelian genetics.
The exposition of the subject matter through- out the book is primarily theoretical, but experimental results-many of them from the work of the author and his colleagues in Edinburgh-are extensively used in the form of illustrative examples.
The inheritance of quantitative differences between individuals-differences of degree rather than of kind-is where genetics has its most direct bearing on evolutionary theory and its most important application to practical problems of biological experimentation and of plant and animal improvement. This book will appeal to a wide range of biologists whose interests embrace the nature of biological variation.
