Demographic genetics / edited by Kenneth M. Weiss and Paul A. Ballonoff.

Date:
[1975], ©1975
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Demographic genetics / edited by Kenneth M. Weiss and Paul A. Ballonoff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    IN THE FIRST PLACE: WHAT IS DEMOGRAPHIC GENETICS? No specific discipline of science is traditionally known as demographic genetics. The field of population genetics in gen¬ eral deals with those aspects of genetic processes which involve consideration of a population instead merely of individuals or single families. In the sense that demography is the study of properties of populations, almost every aspect of traditional population genetics could conceivably be considered dem¬ ographic. Yet the science of demography is usually thought of as a more restricted study of populations. Our purpose here is to identify several demographic aspects of populations whose nature is important to the full understand¬ ing of genetic processes, especially as they relate to human popu¬ lations (for which most data exist). This is not an exercise in territoriality, in which we claim for demographic genetics all aspects of traditional population genetics that are of interest to us. Rather, it is an attempt to note the traditional areas of popula¬ tion genetics which relate to the demography of real populations, and to show how these areas are connected. In a sense this is a personal perspective on a growing area of research. In our opinion, the age distribution, growth, age-specific birth and death rates, migration pattern, size, sex ratio, subdivi¬ sion, and isolation of populations are within what most people think of as demography. Some aspects of these topics would also be included in an ecological-genetics subset of population genetics. We shall try to trace the interrelated development of certain ideas in these areas, and the papers we have chosen to 1