Population biology

All you want to know about Population biology

Population biology is a study of biological populations of organisms, especially in terms of biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology. The term population biology is often used interchangeably with population ecology, although the term with biology is more frequently used when studying diseases, viruses, and microbes, and the term with ecology is used more frequently when studying plants and animals.

Malthus can almost 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 Charles Darwin some inspiration for his seminal work The Origin of Species.

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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

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Charles Darwin, from his autobiography. (1876)