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What role has natural selection played in shaping the structure and function of the vertebrate brain? This accessible book unravels the myriad adaptive explanations that have built up over decades, providing both a review and a critique of the work that has sought to explain which natural selection pressures have led to changes in brain size.

This novel reassessment of the field presents the central concepts in evolutionary game theory and provides an authoritative and up-to-date account. The focus is on concepts that are important for biologists in their attempts to explain observations. This strong connection between concepts and applications is a recurrent theme throughout the book.

Recent research in biomechanics is increasingly revealing a set of special cases where universal physical laws constrain the trajectories and, more controversially, even the endpoints of the evolutionary process. For the first time this book brings together a broad range of examples from the latest research in evolutionary biomechanics to examine this phenomenon.

Birds show bewildering diversity in their life histories, mating systems and risk of extinction. Why, for example, are fairy-wrens so sexually promiscuous while swans show life long monogamy? This fascinating book is a comprehensive re-appraisal of avian diversity, and is the most extensive application of modern comparative methods yet undertaken.

Highlights the importance of mitonuclear coadaptation to the evolution of complex life and in so doing will help to establish mitonuclear ecology as an important subdiscipline in ecology and evolution.

Presents a synthetic overview of the evolutionary biology of species, incorporating their nature, origins, proliferation, and consequences.

Investigates and sets out the common principles of social evolution operating across all taxa and levels of biological organisation.

Food webs describe biological communities in terms of feeding interactions. This book integrates the latest work on community dynamics, ecosystems energetics, and stability to dispel categorisation of the field into separate subdiciplines of population, community, and ecosystem ecology.

The formation of new species ('speciation') creates new biological diversity. This book addresses the role of ecological differences between populations in driving speciation. It reviews this process of 'ecological speciation' from ecological, geographic, and genetic perspectives.

This is an integration of empirical data and theory in quantitative ecology and evolution through the use of mathematical models and statistical methods.

Provides readers with the concepts and practical tools required to understand the maximum entropy principle, and apply it to an understanding of ecological patterns. The theory developed predicts realistic forms for all metrics of ecology that describe patterns in the distribution, abundance, and energetics of species.

Synthesises and evaluates recent advances concerning how species and their interactions influence terrestrial ecosystem processes, such as productivity, decomposition, nutrient cycling, and fluxes.

While the study of viral evolution has developed rapidly in the last 30 years, little attention has been directed toward linking the mechanisms of viral evolution to the epidemiological outcomes of these processes. This book intends to fill this gap by considering the patterns and processes of viral evolution at all its spatial and temporal scales.

This book describes the models, methods and algorithms that are most useful for analysing the ever-increasing supply of molecular sequence data, with a view to furthering our understanding of the evolution of genes and genomes.

Group living is a widespread phenomenon amongst animals. This book focuses on the unifying concepts regarding group behaviour. It discusses the mechanisms that govern the evolution and maintenance of grouping behaviour throughout the animal kingdom, and the factors that control observed group size and group composition in particular situations.

This book provides a thoughtful and original reassessment of our understanding of plant speciation and extinction, by one of the leading workers on plant evolution. It is suitable for use in seminars mostly in departments of botany or plant sciences, and shoudl also be read by workers interested in speciation mechanisms and ecological succession at the community and landscape levels.

This text examines advances in our understanding of the population dynamics of interactions between insect parasitoids and their hosts. Topics addressed include how host-parasitoid interactions are influenced by spatial processes, by age-structure effects, and by competition from other species.

Adaptive radiation, a process that has given rise to much of life's diversity, occurs when a single ancestral species diversifies into an impressive array of species. This book focuses on the 'ecological theory' of adaptive radiation, a body of ideas that began with Darwin and was developed through the first half of the 20th century.

This is an introduction to a set of powerful and extremely flexible modelling techniques, starting at "square one" and continuing with chosen applications. The text also explains how to construct, test, and use dynamic state variable models in a wide range of contexts in evolutionary ecology.

The application of molecular technology has greatly increased our understanding of the role of chromosomal change in plant evolution. This book addresses issues such as heterogeneity, chromosomal rearrangements within species and phenotypic consequences of chromosome doubling.

This text reviews the theory, field experiments, and natural history of sibling rivalry across a broad sweep of organisms, looking at the evolutionary diversity, importance, and consequences of the phenomenon.

Examining the mechanism and action of natural selection in evolution, the author offers his own synthesis of modern evolutionary theory, including discussions of the gene as the unit of selection, clade selection and macroevolution, diversity within and among populations, and other central issues.

Crozier and Pamilo's contribution it to analyse the genetic basis of the patterns of reproduction and resource allocation found in social insect colonies - bees, wasps, ants, and termites. This is done much more comprehensively and with greater depth and insight than in any previous study, and is a significant step forward in the fields of social evolution and population genetics.

An analysis of the evolutionary implication of symmetry which puts forward the theory that asymmetry is related to genetic stability and fitness, so that symmetric individuals have quantifiable advantages over asymmetric individuals. The book is primarily aimed at students and researchers and is part of the OXFORD SERIES IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION.

This volume presents ecological consequences and evolutionary mechanisms that may be associated with behavioural alterations in parasitized hosts. Alterations may result from natural selection favouring the host or parasite, or side-effects caused by physiological changes associated with symbiosis.

Discusses the structure of the geographic ranges of species. This book is concerned with the factors that determine the limits to a species' geographic range, how the sizes of those ranges vary, and patterns in that variation. It also considers the distribution of individuals amongst those sites where a species does occur.

Random fluctuations in population dynamics are fundamentally important in pure and applied ecology. This text introduces demographic and environmental stochasticity and illustrates statistical methods for estimating them from field data.

This study outlines four different categories of co-operation among animals - reciprocal altruism, kinship, group-selected co-operation, and by-product mutualism - and ties them together in a single framework. Studies on co-operation in insects, fish, birds and mammals are then reviewed.

The author of this treatise uses the Anolis lizard to demonstrate the concept of ecology models - how ecological context supplies the natural selection that drives evolution and how evolutionary change among species in turn affects their ecological station.