Population biology is a study of biological populations of organisms, especially in terms of biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology. Rainforests are the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth Biodiversity or biological diversity is the diversity of life. ... A speculative phylogenetic tree of all living things, based on rRNA gene data, showing the separation of the three domains, bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. ...

Malthus can be considered an early population biologist, even though his training was in economics and the term population biology had not been coined. Although his work An Essay on the Principle of Population only dealt with humans for the most part, it gave Darwin some inspiration for his seminal work The Origin of Species. The Rev. ... Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala. ... An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798. ... Various places, things, and persons are associated with Darwin. ... The title page of the 1859 edition of On the Origin of Species. ...

"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work".

Charles Darwin, from his autobiography. (1876)

See also

• Population dynamics

Population dynamics is the study of marginal and long-term changes in the numbers, individual weights and age composition of individuals in one or several populations, and biological and environmental processes influencing those changes. ...

External link

• NERC Centre for Population Biology