Fifty Years of Genetic Load: An Odyssey

In this personal history, one of the pioneers in population genetics recounts the evolution of his ideas about the effects of genetic variability on a population. Tracing the results of successive experiments over the years, it is, like the author's career, highly original.

Bruce Wallace's book is the odyssey of a man whose concern has always been the posing and answering of research questions. Its span extends from a simple attempt to verify some mathematical calculations to a statement of what he considers to be a definitive experiment bearing on current neutralist-selectionist disagreements. "The account proceeds," he writes, "from my Cornell University acceptance that a load (genetic or phenotypic) harms a population, to a later belief that it has little or no bearing on a population's well-being, and, then, to my present feeling that a phenotypic load (which may or may not have a genetic basis) provides the means for culling of excess individuals, thus avoiding overcrowding and increasing the probability that a population will persist through time."

A solid contribution to our understanding of modern population genetics, this book will be of interest to evolutionary and population biologists, ecologists, and historians and philosophers of science.