Essay: On the close relationship between speciation, inbreeding and recessive mutations. Etienne Joly,
[email protected], Toulouse, September 2010 All the ideas developed in this essay are relatively simple, and most of them are related to many Foreword previously published works. So much work, however, This past year, 2009, was the Darwin year, celebrating has already been published on evolution and speciation the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and 150 that an autodidactic newcomer such as myself could years since the publication of his fabulous milestone not hope to read, let alone understand and remember all book, ‘The Origin of Species’ (to which I will the primary papers published previously on evolution subsequently refer to as ‘The Origin’). At the start of and speciation. If I have failed to acknowledge 2009, I was inhabited by a nagging ethical concern : how previous works developing ideas related to those put would humans deal with a situation where a group of forward here, the reader can be assured that this was individuals found themselves fertile among one another, not done maliciously but simply as a result of my but with limited fertility with the rest of the human race ? relative naivety on the subject. I do, however, hold the In other words, could speciation occur within the human firm conviction that, if some of the ideas developed in race ? This concern sprouted from the idea that this essay prove to be correct and relatively novel, it chromosomal rearrangements seemed to me like a very was only possible because of this naivety.