Related papers: Lewontin (1972)
Over the last fifty years, geneticists have made great strides in understanding how our species' evolutionary history gave rise to current patterns of human genetic diversity classically summarized by Lewontin in his 1972 paper, 'The…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms to enable global exploration and to avoid poor performance due to premature convergence. This book chapter reviews runtime analyses that have shown benefits of population diversity,…
Population genetics lies at the heart of evolutionary theory. This topic forms part of many biological science curricula but is rarely taught to physics students. Since physicists are becoming increasingly interested in biological…
The evolutionary edit distance between two individuals in a population, i.e., the amount of applications of any genetic operator it would take the evolutionary process to generate one individual starting from the other, seems like a…
We consider the hypothesis that Evolution promotes population-wide genome patterns that, under randomization, ensures the External Validity of adaptations across population members. An adaptation is Externally Valid (EV) if its effect holds…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Evolutionary graph theory has grown to be an area of intense study. Despite the amount of interest in the field, it seems to have grown separate from other subfields of population genetics and evolution. In the current work I introduce the…
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
An elementary biostatistical theory based on a selectivity-variability principle is proposed to address a question raised by Charles Darwin, namely, how one sex of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with greater variability…
To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…
A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…
Three steps aid in the analysis of selection. First, describe phenotypes by their component causes. Components include genes, maternal effects, symbionts, and any other predictors of phenotype that are of interest. Second, describe fitness…
The question of what determines genetic diversity both between and within species has long remained unsolved by the modern evolutionary theory (MET). However, it has not deterred researchers from producing interpretations of genetic…
Partial clonality is widespread across the tree of life, but most population genetics models are designed for exclusively clonal or sexual organisms. This gap hampers our understanding of the influence of clonality on evolutionary…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
The commonly observed negative correlation between the number of species in an ecological community and disease risk, typically referred to as "the dilution effect", has received a substantial amount of attention over the past decade.…
Mutation and drift play opposite roles in genetics. While mutation creates diversity, drift can cause gene variants to disappear, especially when they are rare. In the absence of natural selection and migration, the balance between the…