Читать книгу Population Genetics - Matthew B. Hamilton - Страница 12

All scientific fields possess a body of concepts as well as a specialized vocabulary used to express these concepts precisely. Population genetics is no different, and the entirety of this book is designed to introduce, explain, and demonstrate these concepts and vocabulary. What may be unique about population genetics among the natural sciences is the way that its practitioners approach questions about the biological world. Population genetics is a dialog between predictions based on the principles of Mendelian inheritance and observations from the empirical measurement of genotype and allele frequencies. Idealized predictions stemming from general principles form the basis of hypotheses that can be tested through observation, experiment, and comparison. At the same time, empirical patterns observed within and among populations are evaluated for evidence of their causes via predictive models. This first chapter will explore some of the ways that population genetics approaches and defines problems that are relevant to the topics in all chapters. The chapter is also intended to give some insight into how to approach the study of population genetics.