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Rating: 
Summary: A great collection.
Review: My only regret is that I had entered the field of evolutionary biology too late to have met Kimura. Although the neutral theory has perhaps had the most ranging effect, I would rather place his work with diffusion models as his most important contribution. This collection puts together the beautiful diffusion papers written by Kimura on the subjects of fixation probability, quantitative genetics and more -- including the hard-to-get work in Applied Probability! One of the most valued books in my collection.
Rating:
Summary: A great collection.
Review: My only regret is that I had entered the field of evolutionary biology too late to have met Kimura. Although the neutral theory has perhaps had the most ranging effect, I would rather place his work with diffusion models as his most important contribution. This collection puts together the beautiful diffusion papers written by Kimura on the subjects of fixation probability, quantitative genetics and more -- including the hard-to-get work in Applied Probability! One of the most valued books in my collection.
Rating:
Summary: A real treasure!
Review: This is fantastic book, to be treasured by anyone interested in understanding (really understanding) molecular evolution, at a mathematical level. Most books on molecular evolution just give the formulas derived in this book, without proof. For the happy few who have the mathematical skills necessary to comprehend the derivations in the papers by Kimura, this book is a treasure. Kimura was not the first to apply the Kolmogorov (known by the physicists as Fokker-Plank) equation to the statistics of gene diffusion, but he did the most with it. He used it to derive the expression for the fixation probability of a gene in a finite population, used in most works on molecular evolution.Probably the best paper included in this volume is "Diffusion Models in Population Genetics", a true mathematical tour de force. Also included in this volume are Kimura's pioneering works on the Neutral Theory of Evolution, and his early attempts at calibrating and using molecular clocks to measure the distance in time of evolutionary events. Most of these later works are of historical interest: of perennial value in this book are the mathematical derivations, which are still unsurpassed. Since mathematical skills are much reduced among most professionals (in part due to computer addiction), it will be a long time before this book is obsolete.
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