Related papers: High Frequency Haplotypes are Expected Events, not…
In unicellular organisms such as bacteria and in most viruses, mutations mainly occur during reproduction. Thus, genotypes with a high birth rate should have a higher mutation rate. However, standard models of asexual adaptation such as the…
Species trees represent the historical divergences of populations or species, while gene trees trace the ancestry of individual gene copies sampled within those populations. In cases involving rapid speciation, gene trees with topologies…
The emergence of agriculture is suggested to have driven extensive human population growths. However, genetic evidence from maternal mitochondrial genomes suggests major population expansions began before the emergence of agriculture.…
When long-lived, balancing selection can lead to trans-species polymorphisms that are shared by two or more species identical by descent. In this case, the gene genealogies at the selected sites cluster by allele instead of by species and,…
Mounting evidence suggests that natural populations can harbor extensive fitness diversity with numerous genomic loci under selection. It is also known that genealogical trees for populations under selection are quantifiably different from…
We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental…
We study the fractional populations in chromosome inherited diseases. The governing equations for the fractional populations are found and solved in the presence of mutation and selection. The physical fixed points obtained are used to…
Surveys often ask respondents to report nonnegative counts, but respondents may misremember or round to a nearby multiple of 5 or 10. This phenomenon is called heaping, and the error inherent in heaped self-reported numbers can bias…
Genotype-phenotype (GP) maps specify how the random mutations that change genotypes generate variation by altering phenotypes, which, in turn, can trigger selection. Many GP maps share the following general properties: 1) The number of…
We consider two versions of stochastic population models with mutation and selection. The first approach relies on a multitype branching process; here, individuals reproduce and change type (i.e., mutate) independently of each other,…
Is there an advantage to heterogeneity in a population where individuals grow and divide by fission? This is a broad question, to which there is no easy universal answer. This article aims to provide a quantitative answer in the specific…
A phenomenon that strongly influences the demography of small introduced populations and thereby potentially their genetic diversity is the Allee effect, a reduction in population growth rates at small population sizes. We take a stochastic…
We define a general class of models representing natural selection between two alleles. The population size and spatial structure are arbitrary, but fixed. Genetics can be haploid, diploid, or otherwise; reproduction can be asexual or…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
Understanding functional organization of genetic information is a major challenge in modern biology. Following the initial publication of the human genome sequence in 2001, advances in high-throughput measurement technologies and efficient…
Recent work has shown that expression level is the main predictor of a gene’s evolutionary rate, and that more highly expressed genes evolve slower. A possible explanation for this observation is selection for proteins which fold…
Hysteresis and bet-hedging (random choice of phenotypes) are two different observations typically linked with multiplicity of phenotypes in biological systems. Hysteresis can be viewed as form of the system's persistent memory of past…
Replication helps ensure that a genotype-phenotype association observed in a genome-wide association (GWA) study represents a credible association and is not a chance finding or an artifact due to uncontrolled biases. We discuss…
When a defendant's DNA matches a sample found at a crime scene, how compelling is the match? To answer this question, DNA analysts typically use relative frequencies, random-match probabilities or likelihood ratios. They compute these…
How to define and use the concept of inclusive fitness is a contentious topic in evolutionary theory. Inclusive fitness can be used to calculate selection on a focal gene, but it is also applied to whole organisms. Individuals are then…