Computational Molecular Evolution—Ziheng Yang. 2006. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 376 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-856699-1 (ISBN-10 0-19-856699-9) £60 $115 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-19-856702-8 (ISBN-10 0-19-856702-2) £27.50 $52.50 (paperback).

Abstract

Ziheng Yang's book Computational Molecular Evolution is a very recent addition to the realm on textbooks from that field. Contrary to classics like Joe Felsenstein's Inferring Phylogenies (2004) or Swofford et al.'s Phylogeny Reconstruction (1996), Ziheng Yang does not attempt to completely cover the field of phylogenetics. Instead, he adopts the point of view that molecular evolutionary analyses should be formulated as a problem of statistical inference. This is a long-standing viewpoint (Cavalli-Sforza and Edwards, 1967) but one that has been neglected among most texts.