This work is designed to do two things: One - to explain how living things function, evolve and interact with each other, and non-living surroundings. Two - put human societies and their activities into their biological context.

The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change is about the core of population genetics — the nature of genetic variation and changes in genetic variation. Topics covered include the nature of variation, the measurement of variation, multilocus dynamics and speciation. Particular attention is paid to methodological questions and to making clear the limitations of the models used. Although many of the details have been outdated by the advances of the last twenty years, particularly in molecular genetics, this is a classic of the field, and probably still required reading for population geneticists. -- Danny Yee

"François Jacob is one of the world's leading scientists, a professor of the Collège de France and the Institut Pasteur, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine (with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod). He has written an extraordinarily thought-provoking and far-ranging book on evolution which, as he states in his preface, "deals with genes and men, with sex, aging, and molecules. Above all, it deals with the theory of evolution, its status as well as its content. For if the theory of evolution provides a framework without which there is little hope to understand where we come from and why we are as we are, it is important to define the limits beyond which it is used no longer as a scientific theory, but as a myth.""--Back cover.

This book deals with a key area of population genetics: the ratio of the sexes in a population, or the allocation of resources to male versus female reproductive function. Samuel Karlin and Sabin Lessard establish the formal theoretical aspects of the evolution of sex ratio within the constraints of genetic mechanisms of sex determination. Their results generalize and unify existing work on the topic, strengthening previous conceptions in some cases and, in other instances, offering new directions of research. There are two main approaches to understanding the causes and effects of sex ratio. One approach focuses on the optimization and adaptive functions of sex allocation, while the other emphasizes the consequences of genetic sex determination mechanisms. In discussing the utility of these two approaches, Professors Karlin and Lessard examine the principal sex-determining mechanisms and facts involved in sex ratio representations, the various genetic and environmental factors that contribute to adaptive sex expression, and the evolution of sex determining systems and controls. From a population genetic perspective, the authors derive evolutionary properties in support of the high incidence of 1:1 sex ratio in natural populations and investigate the conditions that can explain the occurrence of biased sex ratio.