Related papers: Population genetics: an introduction for physicist…
These lecture notes introduce key concepts of mathematical population genetics within the most elementary setting and describe a few recent applications to microbial evolution experiments. Pointers to the literature for further reading are…
Evolutionary biology shares many concepts with statistical physics: both deal with populations, whether of molecules or organisms, and both seek to simplify evolution in very many dimensions. Often, methodologies have undergone parallel and…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
What is a population? This review considers how a population may be defined in terms of understanding the structure of the underlying genetics of the individuals involved. The main approach is to consider statistically identifiable groups…
The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…
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…
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…
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?…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
We propose in this article a brief description of the work, over almost a decade, resulting from a collaboration between mathematicians and biologists from four different research laboratories, identifiable as the co-authors of the articles…
We propose a mathematical framework for natural selection in finite populations. Traditionally, many of the selection-based processes used to describe cultural and genetic evolution (such as imitation and birth-death models) have been…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
We present a model for evolving population which maintains genetic polymorphism. By introducing random mutation in the model population at a constant rate, we observe that the population does not become extinct but survives, keeping…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…
Human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, health…
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…
The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within…
Organisms often grow, migrate and compete in liquid environments, as well as on solid surfaces. However, relatively little is known about what happens when competing species are mixed and compressed by fluid turbulence. In these lectures we…