Related papers: Genealogical distance under selection
Non-selective effects, like genetic drift, are an important factor in modern conceptions of evolution, and have been extensively studied for constant population sizes. Here, we consider non-selective evolution in the case of growing…
We consider a stochastic model for an evolving population. We show that in the presence of genotype extinctions the population dies out for a low mutation probability but may survive for a high mutation probability. This turns upside down…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
When a beneficial mutation occurs in a population, the new, favored allele may spread to the entire population. This process is known as a selective sweep. Suppose we sample $n$ individuals at the end of a selective sweep. If we focus on a…
Populations can be genetically isolated both by geographic distance and by differences in their ecology or environment that decrease the rate of successful migration. Empirical studies often seek to investigate the relationship between…
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,…
Understanding the evolution of a set of genes or species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The problem we study here takes as input a set of trees describing {possibly discordant} evolutionary scenarios for a given set of…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
Genetic hitchhiking describes evolution at a neutral locus that is linked to a selected locus. If a beneficial allele rises to fixation at the selected locus, a characteristic polymorphism pattern (so-called selective sweep) emerges at the…
The entropy rates of the Wright-Fisher process, the Moran process, and generalizations are computed and used to compare these processes and their dependence on standard evolutionary parameters. Entropy rates are measures of the variation…
We analyse a model consisting of a population of individuals which is subdivided into a finite set of demes, each of which has a fixed but differing number of individuals. The individuals can reproduce, die and migrate between the demes…
Repetitions within a given genealogical tree provides some information about the degree of consanguineity of a population. They can be analyzed with techniques usually employed in statistical physics when dealing with fixed point…
We consider a system of two competing populations in two-dimensional heterogeneous environments. The populations are assumed to move horizontally and vertically with different probabilities, but are otherwise identical. We regard these…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
We discuss two different ways of chromosomes' and genomes' evolution. Purifying selection dominates in large panmictic populations, where Mendelian law of independent gene assortment is valid. If the populations are small, recombination…
We reconsider the Moran model in continuous time with population size $N$, two allelic types, and selection. We introduce a new particle representation, which we call the labelled Moran model, and which has the same distribution of type…
The process of `Evolutionary Diffusion', i.e. reproduction with local mutation but without selection in a biological population, resembles standard Diffusion in many ways. However, Evolutionary Diffusion allows the formation of local peaks…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…