I have for a number of years taught a course in population genetics for students interested in plant and animal breeding. The objective of the course has been to lay a foundation in population genetics for the concepts of quantitative genetics which are introduced in the last third of the course. I have not been able to find an appropriate text for this purpose. For a quarter of a century, Falconer's Introduction to Quantitative Genetics has been the standard, and excellent, text in that subject. For my purposes, however, this text is not sufficiently detailed in the population genetics basis for quantitative theory. A number of good texts in population genetics are available, of which Li's First Course in Population Genetics is didactically the best. But these texts are directed toward the genetics of natural populations, rather than domestic populations, breeding under human control. They also tend to treat quantitative genetics gingerly, if at all. I have therefore developed the present text from my teaching notes. The chapters of this book are labeled "Lectures". Each is intended to correspond approximately to the amount of material which can be covered in a 50-minute lecture. Divisions are, of course, dictated by the natural divisions of the subject matter, and the lectures are therefore not of uniform length. Nevertheless, in so far as possible, an attempt has been made to make the average length a lecture's worth.

I The Hardy-Weinberg Law

1. The Hardy-Weinberg Law
2. Conditions for Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium
3. Applications of the Hardy-Weinberg Law
4. Snyder's Ratios
II Constant Allele Frequencies
5. Multiple Alleles
6. Separate Sexes
7. Sex Linkage
8. Other Phenomena Associated with Sex
9. Linkage
10. Recombination Equilibrium
11. Polyploidy
III Systematic Forces
12. Selection
13. The General Selection Equation
14. Equilibrium Under Selection
15. Mutation
16. Interaction of Mutation with Selection
17. Migration
IV Dispersive Forces
18. The Finite Population Model
19. Inbreeding
20. The Development of Inbreeding
21. Genic Drift
22. Genotypic Drift
23. Effective Breeding Size
24. Interaction of Inbreeding with Systematic Forces
25. Coancestry
26. Applications of Coancestry
27. Tabular Calculation of Coancestry
28. Path Calculation of F
29. Systematic Inbreeding
30. Assortative Mating
V Quantitative Inheritance
31. Metric Traits
32. Evidence for the Theory of Metric Inheritance
33. Phenotypic Value
34. The Single Locus Model
35. Breeding Values
36. Dominance Deviations
37. Multiple Loci
38. Causal Components of Variance
39. Analytical Components
40. Heritability
41. Realized Heritability
42. Other Estimates of h2
43. Environmental Variance
44. Repeatability
Appendix I Exercise Solutions
Appendix II Review Lectures
R1. Basic Genetics
R2. Probability
R3. Statistical Methods
References.