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Evolutionary biology is a subfield of biology concerned with the origin and descent of species, as well as their change over time, i.e. their evolution. One who studies evolutionary biology is known as an evolutionary biologist, or less frequently evolutionist.

Evolutionary biology is a kind of meta field because it includes scientists from many traditional taxonomically-oriented disciplines. For example, it generally includes scientists who may have a specialist training in particular organisms such as mammalogy, ornithology, or herpetology but use those organisms as systems to answer general questions in evolution. It also generally includes paleontogists who use fossils to answer questions about the mode and tempo of evolution, as well as theoreticians in areas such as population genetics and evolutionary theory. In the 1990s developmental biology made a re-entry into evolutionary biology from its initial exclusion from the modern synthesis through the study of evolutionary developmental biology.

History

Evolutionary biology as an academic discipline in its own right emerged as a result of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, however, that a significant number of universities had departments that specifically included the term evolutionary biology in their titles. In the United States, as a result of the rapid growth of molecular and cell biology, many universities have split (or aggregated) their biology departments into molecular and cell biology-style departments and ecology and evolutionary biology-style departments (which often have subsumed older departments in paleontology, zoology and the like).

Bibliography

Textbooks

• Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates, 3rd edition (1998) ISBN 0878931899
• Mark Ridley, Evolution, Blackwell, 3rd edition (2003) ISBN 1405103450

Notable monographs and other works

(only author, date of publication and title listed here, see the article for publication details)

• Charles Darwin (1859) The Origin of Species and (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
• Ronald Fisher (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
• John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry (1997) The Major Transitions in Evolution

• Important publications in evolutionary biology.
• Category:Notable publications in evolutionary biology

Topics in evolutionary biology

• Foster's rule

• Evolutionary biology