title: Chaos and evolution.
abstract: There is growing interest in applying nonlinear methods to evolutionary biology. With good reason: the living world is full of nonlinearities, responsible for steady states, regular oscillations, and chaos in biological systems. Evolutionists may find nonlinear dynamics important in studying short-term dynamics of changes in genotype frequency, and in understanding selection and its constraints. More speculatively, dynamical systems theory may be important because nonlinear fluctuations in some traits may sometimes be favored by selection, and because some long-run patterns of evolutionary change could be described using these methods.
authors.affiliation: Regis Ferriere is at the Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA; Laboratoire d'Ecologie, Ecole Normale Sup6rieure, 46 rue d'Ulm, 75230 Paris, Cedex 05, France.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ferriere
authors.forename: G A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Fox