The Character Concept in Evolutionary Biology

Characters and the conception of characters are central to all studies of evolution, and because evolution is the central organizing principle of biology, this book should appeal to a wide cross-section of biologists. Almost all evolutionary biologists, indeed all biologists, use particular features to study life. These characteristics or features used by evolutionary biologists are used in a particular way to unravel a tangled evolutionary history, document the rate of evolutionary change, or as evidence of biodiversity.