Notable: Coevolution drives biological complexity
Notable paper: Zaman L, Meyer JR, Devangam S, Bryson DM, Lenski RE, et al. (2014) Coevolution Drives the Emergence of Complex Traits and Promotes Evolvabilit...
All posts tagged with population genetics
ARG is the word
Adam Siepel has written a very useful explainer about a new preprint he has posted with Matthew Rasmussen on the arXiv preprint server: “Our Paper: Genome-wi...
Inbreeding impression
I ran across an io9 article from 2011, “Why inbreeding really isnt as bad as you think it is”, which is topical for some of the genetics I’ll be teaching ove...
Tomoko Ohta profile
Current Biology has published an interview of the esteemed Japanese population geneticist Tomoko Ohta Ohta:profile:2012.
Link: Effective size through genealogy
Sandwalk: “What William the Conqueror’s Companions Teach Us about Effective Population Size”.
Overdominance and rapid adaptation
Introduction
Founder effect
A founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number of initial founders of a new population.
Kin selection strikes back
Last year I noted the publication of a paper in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson, which claimed that kin selection is not a suffic...
DNA relatives
Steve Mount works through the math of “relative finder” predictions from 23andMe (and by extension, other personal genome tests): “Genetic genealogy and the ...
What is the human mutation rate?
Last spring I wrote about a study that used whole-genome comparisons between parents and offspring to estimate the rate of per-genome mutation in humans (“A ...
mtDNA, purifying selection and "distorted" genealogies
I’m going to pass along this paper without much comment, it’s by Jon Seger and colleagues and it came out earlier this year in Genetics Seger:2010:
Inclusive fitness works
I can’t believe the amount of attention the paper by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson Nowak:eusociality:2010 has gotten. It was in last week...
Migration thinking
Murray Cox and Michael Hammer have a short commentary piece in the current BMC Biology, titled, “A question of scale: Human migrations writ large and small” ...
Mailbag: mtDNA "out of whack"
Re: “Time to revise the mtDNA timescale?”:
Time to revise the mtDNA timescale?
Krzysztof Cyran and Marek Kimmel (2010) have presented a revised set of estimates of the human mtDNA most recent common ancestor (MRCA). It’s an interesting...
Lag times of biological invasions
A biological invasion occurs when a species rapidly colonizes a new geographical area. The new area is often very far from the regions considered to be part ...
Passing on your fertility to your kids
From the NY Times earlier this spring, a profile of a New York woman with an exceptional legacy:
The Neandertal fraction
I’ve gotten the same question a few times, and have seen it elsewhere, so I thought it would be worth a short post to explain it. And for those readers who’v...
More X-Woman thoughts
I had a great session with my advanced students yesterday running through different evolutionary scenarios for the X-Woman. This and some later posts will fo...
An insertion into deep history
A couple of weeks ago I noted a new article by Chad Huff and colleagues in PNAS. It wasn’t available yet when I wrote, but I’ve had the chance to study it no...
R. A. Fisher's model of adaptation
Chapter 2 of R. A. Fisher’s Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is remarkable for many reasons. In it, he presents a model of selection in an age-structure...
Sergey Gavrilets on the two fitness landscapes
Sewall Wright’s metaphor of the “fitness landscape” is fundamental in the way many biologists think about adaptation. The idea of a population “climbing” tow...
Quote: Fisher on the limits of diffusion
R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright introduced diffusion approximation methods into genetics; Fisher (1937) was the first to consider spatial disperal using a rea...
Crow and Kimura back in print
A new printing of a classic population genetics text has been issued this year: An Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, by James Crow and Motoo Kimura.
Molecular systematics and species trees
I’d like to point readers to a recent essay in Evolution, by Scott V. Edwards, titled, “Is a new and general theory of molecular systematics emerging?”
An (old) interview with Warren Ewens
I ran across an interview between Anna Plutinski and population geneticist Warren Ewens.
Quote: Fisher defining epistasis
People often complain that R. A. Fisher wrote in a hard-to-read style; unnecessarily verbose and indirect. Either I don’t tend to mind, or I find that the st...
Phenotypic variance
I’ve intermittently been reading through William Provine’s The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. It’s related to a project simmering on my back bur...
Could genetic drift really break your heart?
Are these people crazy?
Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size
This is a complicated story with many interlocking parts. Telling the whole story may well take me fifty posts. There’s a lot of new science hiding in here w...