Another New Book for Comparative Biologists

The University of Chicago Press has recently published another outstanding new book for comparative biologists. Charles Nunn‘s The Comparative Approach in Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology provides insightful reviews of methods for ancestral character reconstruction, phylogenetic tests for character correlation, phylogenetic diversification analyses, and many other topics. Nunn’s book seems well-suited to a broad range of readers. It seems tractable for novices (the second chapter explains what a phylogenetic tree is), and those with math anxiety won’t be deterred by dense discussions of mathematical or computational algorithms. At the same time, seasoned comparative biologists will likely appreciated Nunn’s fairly comprehensive coverage of alternative methods and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Although most of Nunn’s examples are from anthropology, the general lessons in this book are likely to be of interest to many anole biologists and the examples from anthropology are often insightful and thought provoking. To top it all off, the book is accompanied by really nice webpage called AnthroTree that features tutorials and worked examples.