Genetic epidemiologists have good reason to be interested in this volume, since the subject derives considerably from quantitative genetics. From a total of 55 papers, genetic epidemiology, sensu stricto, is well represented by papers from Sing, Murphy, Eaves, Cloninger, Fulker, and Iselius, and there is a summary by Elston. Some of these contain important new material unlikely to be published elsewhere, and others are useful summaries of better-known work, the more valuable for being presented in the more leisurely way allowed by a book. There are also excellent theoretical papers on the nature, origin, and maintenance of polygenic variation and many others on the application of this theory to plant and animal breeding.
What could scarcely have been predicted at the first international conference in 1976 are the contributions from molecular geneticists speculating on mechanisms for the origin and possible manipulation of continuous genetic variance. However, their presence still looks like tokenism, since there are no truly convincing signs in this collection of a serious courtship between molecular and quantitative genetics, let alone a fruitful marriage. The closest approach, perhaps, is to be found in the chapter by Sing and colleagues, who have been using Lange's algorithm to estimate simultaneously the contributions of measured polymorphism at the apo-E locus and polygenic variation to individual differences in serum lipids.