Summary: 574
SpecialFeature
Ecology, 84(3), 2003, pp. 574­577
2003 by the Ecological Society of America
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM COMMUNITY GENETICS?
JAMES P. COLLINS1
Department of Biology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-1501 USA
INTRODUCTION
Throughout the 20th century, investigators argued
that genetics should be incorporated into ecological
explanations (Collins 1986). C. C. Adams (1915) sug-
gested very early in the century that emerging concepts
in Mendelian genetics could help ecologists to explain
the distribution of land snails in the genus Io. Genecol-
ogy developed from 1920 to 1950, with research fo-
cused on intraspecific variation that anticipated eco-
logical genetics, which developed in the 1950s and
1960s. Evolutionary ecology emerged in the 1960s,
driven by empirical results in three areas (Collins
1986): ecologically significant traits like competitive

Source: Antonovics, Janis - Department of Biology, University of Virginia
Knight, Tiffany - Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis

Collections: Biology and Medicine; Environmental Sciences and Ecology