I'm going to post this to several lists. I apologize for the duplication to those who, like me, belong to more than one of them. In the early 1980s, I read a fascinating little book by Vern Grant, called "Plant Speciation." It laid out, in what I thought was a fairly straight forward way, where new plant species might come from. Among the cases in point were the rain lilies. Grant used them as examples of new species arising from polyploidy and from parthenogenic mechanisms. Now there is another book on speciation, which I just received my copy of: "Speciation" by Coyne & Orr, published in 2004, so really quite current. You can find it in Bookfinder, Barnes & Noble on-line, and probably other places. The cost seems to be about $60 (US), new or used, for the soft cover edition. It's called a textbook, but there are no "exercises" at the ends of the chapters. As I work my way through it, I'm going to bounce my impressions of the material off my fellow list members. Maybe that way I'll absorb more of it. More importantly, I'll be very interested in the comments of others who have an interest in speciation. The conclusions seem to be, at first glance, that Ernst Mayr's definition of the "Biological Species Concept" is holding up well, with some emendations as we learn more detail about the subject. The Biological Species Concept was that a species is a population or populations of interbreeding individuals. It is also concluded that recent evidence points to natural and sexual selection being the dominant forces in speciation, and that genetic drift plays only a minor role. The authors conclude that allopatry, while important in most cases, is not always necessary for speciation. It is even concluded that "species" is a real entity, as opposed to being just an arbitrary rationalization created solely by the human mind for purposes of organizing information. I've sometimes not been so sure about that myself. I'll be interested to see how the book deals with the dynamic aspects of species and populations. That is the part that fascinates me -- can we ever step twice into the same river of species? If you are interested in the current state of the process of speciation, I think this is going to be the book that you must read. "Speciation" by Jerry A. Coyne and H. Allen Orr, pub. by Sinauer Associates, Sunderland. Mass., 2004. IBSN 0-87893-089-2. Jim Shields in central Indiana (USA) ************************************************* Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 Shields Gardens, Ltd. P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/ Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA Tel. ++1-317-867-3344 or toll-free 1-866-449-3344 in USA