Amitabh Joshi studies and teaches evolutionary genetics and population ecology at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. His current research interests are in life-history evolution, the evolutionary genetics of biological clocks, and small population and metapopulation dynamics. He also enjoys music (especially traditional qawwali in Braj, Farsi, Punjabi and Urdu), history, philosophy, and reading and writing poetry in Urdu, Hindi and English.

One of the most common questions that people get asked is “What do you do?”. When I say that I am an evolutionary biologist, most people respond with “Oh, so you study fossils”. My response to this is to say that I do not work with fossils, and that I am an evolutionary geneticist. This clarification typically results in the person saying “Oh, so you work with DNA.” By the time I have said that I do not actually work with DNA either, the person who asked the question begins to appear somewhat confused. It seems that many people do not really have a clear idea of what evolutionary biologists today do, the kinds of questions they seek to answer, and the approaches and methodologies they use. Of course, many evolutionary biologists do work with fossils or DNA, or both, but there are also large numbers of researchers in evolution whose work does not fit into these stereotypes. In the first part of this series, we looked at the domain of evolutionary biology. In this article, we shall look at some of the sub-disciplines of evolution, embodying slightly different questions, techniques and emphases.


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Address for Correspondence

Amitabh Joshi
Evolutionary and Organismal Biology Unit
Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research
P.Box 6436, Jakkur
Bangalore 560 064, India.
Email: ajoshi@jncasr.ac.in