Epistasis and the Evolutionary Process

The dominant paradigm in evolutionary genetics in this century has been additivity, or that effects of genes are independent and are summed together to produce an individual's phenotype.

Over the last two decades, however, research into epistasis, or non-additive genetics, has been exploding.

It has become clear that the effects of genes are rarely independent, and to reach a fuller understanding of the process of evolution, one must consider the issue of complex traits, meaning gene interactions as well as gene-environment interactions.

This book will servce as a primer on no-additive evolutionary genetics, integrating the work to date on all levels of evolutionary investigation of the importance of epistasis to the evolutionary process in general.

It includes an historic perspective on this emerging field, an in-depth discussion of terminology, discussions of the effects of epistasis at several different levels of biological organisation (the individual, the population, the metapopulation and the species) and combinations of theoretical and experimental approaches to analyse a single question. It will appeal to not only evolutionary biologists, but to a wide audience, including those in the medical and agricultural genetics fields.