Related papers: Lewontin (1972)
Both genetic drift and natural selection cause the frequencies of alleles in a population to vary over time. Discriminating between these two evolutionary forces, based on a time series of samples from a population, remains an outstanding…
Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect mutation rates will evolve downwards. However, we find this…
We study the population genetics of two neutral alleles under reversible mutation in the \Lambda-processes, a population model that features a skewed offspring distribution. We describe the shape of the equilibrium allele frequency…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
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,…
In an evolutionary algorithm, the population has a very important role as its size has direct implications regarding solution quality, speed, and reliability. Theoretical studies have been done in the past to investigate the role of…
Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…
Quantifying diversity is of central importance for the study of structure, function and evolution of microbial communities. The estimation of microbial diversity has received renewed attention with the advent of large-scale metagenomic…
The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…
The evolution of genetic systems has been analyzed through the use of modifier gene models, in which a neutral gene is posited to control the transmission of other genes under selection. Analysis of modifier gene models has found the…
In 1967, Frederick Lord posed a conundrum that has confused scientists for over half a century. Subsequently named Lord's 'paradox', the puzzle centres on the observation that two different approaches to estimating the effect of an exposure…
In the classic view introduced by R. A. Fisher, a quantitative trait is encoded by many loci with small, additive effects. Recent advances in QTL mapping have begun to elucidate the genetic architectures underlying vast numbers of…
Objections to Darwinian evolution are often based on the time required to carry out the necessary mutations. Seemingly, exponential numbers of mutations are needed. We show that such estimates ignore the effects of natural selection, and…
Kingman's model describes the evolution of a one-locus haploid population of infinite size and discrete generations under the competition of selection and mutation. A random generalisation has been made in a previous paper which assumes all…
In spite of the wide range of his book, Cournot did not know some essential discoveries in natural sciences (William Herschel, Daniel Bernoulli, Humboldt) and his deliberations about measurement were almost useless. But he introduced the…
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…
Genetic redundancy is ubiquitous and can be found in any organism. However, it has been argued that genetic redundancy reduces total population fitness, and therefore, redundancy is unlikely to evolve. In this letter, we study an…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…
Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…