Related papers: Lewontin (1972)
There is an urgent and well-recognized need to extend genetic studies to diverse populations, but several obstacles continue to be prohibitive, including (but not limited to) the difficulty of recruiting individuals from diverse populations…
Until recently, the use of Bayesian inference in population genetics was limited to a few cases because for many realistic population genetic models the likelihood function cannot be calculated analytically . The situation changed with the…
We revisit the problem of influencing the sex ratio of a population by subjecting reproduction of each family to some stopping rule. As an easy consequence of the strong law of large numbers, no such modification is possible in the sense…
Phenotypic fluctuations and plasticity can generally affect the course of evolution, a process known as the Baldwin effect. Several studies have recast this effect and claimed that phenotypic plasticity acceler- ates evolutionary rate (the…
The Price equation partitions total evolutionary change into two components. The first component provides an abstract expression of natural selection. The second component subsumes all other evolutionary processes, including changes during…
The universal genetic code presents a fundamental paradox in molecular biology. Recent advances in synthetic biology have demonstrated that the code is remarkably flexible--organisms can survive with 61 codons instead of 64, natural…
Many physical and natural systems, including the population of species, evolve in habitats with spatial stochastic variations of the individuals' motility. We study here the effect of those fluctuations on invasion and genetic loss. A…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
Economic growth and the growth of human population in the past 2,000,000 years are extensively examined. Data are found to be in a clear contradiction of the currently accepted explanations of the mechanism of growth, which revolve around…
We consider the Moran model of population genetics with two types, mutation, and selection, and investigate the line of descent of a randomly-sampled individual from a contemporary population. We trace this ancestral line back into the…
We investigate the behavior of a population genetics model introduced by Waxman and Peck incorporating mutation, selection, and pleiotropy. The population is infinite and continuous variation of genotype is allowed. Nonetheless, Waxman and…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…
We considered a {multi-block} molecular model of biological evolution, in which fitness is a function of the mean types of alleles located at different parts (blocks) of the genome. We formulated an infinite population model with selection…
The metapopulation theory explores the population persistence in fragmented habitats by considering a balance between the extinction of local populations and recolonization of empty sites. In general, the extinction and colonization rates…
A gene's rate of sequence evolution is among the most fundamental evolutionary quantities in common use, but what determines evolutionary rates has remained unclear. Here, we show that the two most commonly used methods to disentangle the…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
The purpose of this note is to provide proofs for some facts about the NK model of evolution proposed by Kauffman and Levin. In the case of normally distributed fitness summands, some of these facts have been previously conjectured and…
The notion of information pervades informal descriptions of biological systems, but formal treatments face the problem of defining a quantitative measure of information rooted in a concept of fitness, which is itself an elusive notion.…
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…