Related papers: High Frequency Haplotypes are Expected Events, not…
The study of cultural evolution benefits from detailed analysis of cultural transmission in specific human domains. Chess provides a platform for understanding the transmission of knowledge due to its active community of players, precise…
We consider a population of haploid individuals reproducing sexually, i.e. for which the genome of each individual is a random mixture of the genome of its two parents. We assume that initially one individual carries a mutation at one…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
We consider the problem of detecting and estimating the strength of association between a trait of interest and alleles or haplotypes in a small genomic region (e.g. a gene or a gene complex), when no direct information on that region is…
Compared to a neutral model, purifying selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters the patterns of sampled genetic variation. Although these distortions may be common in nature, our understanding of how we expect…
This paper considers the relative frequencies of distinct types of individuals in multitype branching processes. We prove that the frequencies are asymptotically multivariate normal when the initial number of ancestors is large and the time…
We show how to incorporate fluctuations of the recombination rate along the chromosome into standard gene-genealogical models for the decorrelation of gene histories. This enables us to determine how small-scale fluctuations (Poissonian…
Many questions that we have about the history and dynamics of organisms have a geographical component: How many are there, and where do they live? How do they move and interbreed across the landscape? How were they moving a thousand years…
The distributed genome hypothesis states that the set of genes in a population of bacteria is distributed over all individuals that belong to the specific taxon. It implies that certain genes can be gained and lost from generation to…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…
We study a family of selection-mutation models of a sexual population structured by a phenotypical trait. The main feature of these models is the asymmetric trait heredity or fecundity between the parents : we assume that each individual…
Large populations may contain numerous simultaneously segregating polymorphisms subject to natural selection. Since selection acts on individuals whose fitness depends on many loci, different loci affect each other's dynamics. This leads to…
Gene expression is a complex and quantitative trait that is influenced by both genetic and non-genetic regulators including environmental factors. Evaluating the contribution of environment to gene expression regulation and identifying…
Mendez et al. recently report the identification of a Y chromosome lineage from an African American that is an outgroup to all other known Y haplotypes, and report a time to most recent common ancestor, TMRCA, for human Y lineages that is…
When an advantageous mutation occurs in a population, the favorable allele may spread to the entire population in a short time, an event known as a selective sweep. As a result, when we sample $n$ individuals from a population and trace…
It has been a puzzling question why some organisms reproduce sexually. Fisher and Muller hypothesized that reproducing by sex can speed up the evolution. They explained that in the sexual reproduction, recombination can combine beneficial…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
It has been shown that differences in fecundity variance can influence the probability of invasion of a genotype in a population, i.e. a genotype with lower variance in offspring number can be favored in finite populations even if it has a…
How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…
When the same set of genes appear in two top ranking gene lists in two different studies, it is often of interest to estimate the probability for this being a chance event. This overlapping probability is well known to follow the…