Abstract
Species hold a central position in the hierarchical organization of biological diversity and hence the mechanism of species formation has always been and still is a central problem in evolutionary biology (Mayr 1982a). The analysis of speciation has lagged far behind that of adaptation, due to a variety of causes ranging from problems with the species concept (Ehrlich and Raven 1969; Levin 1979), to inherent difficulties in pursuing the problem of speciation experimentally (Lewontin 1974), and to doubts whether speciation is indeed a separate process of evolution independent of adaptation (Eldredge and Gould 1972). The last point has been the basis of an ongoing debate on adaptive vs non-adaptive speciation and the debate has been recently brought to an all-time high level of interest by Gould’s proposition that speciation events are the major cause of biological diversity (Gould and Eldredge 1977; Goul 1980; Stanley 1979).
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© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Singh, R.S. (1990). Patterns of Species Divergence and Genetic Theories of Speciation. In: Wöhrmann, K., Jain, S.K. (eds) Population Biology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74474-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74474-7_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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