Research | KITP

Evolution works through natural selection that acts on genetic variation. A mounting body of evidence suggests that large populations harbor a great deal of such “selectable” variation. This implies that in order to understand how genetic variants (a.k.a. polymorphisms) spread through populations, theoretical models must account for interactions between polymorphisms at different genetic loci and in different individuals. The problem is further encumbered by the effect of sex and recombination that reshuffle polymorphisms between individual genomes. Yet, this “many-body problem” of evolutionary dynamics lends itself to a Statistical Genetics approach with many parallels to Statistical Physics: as is the case with Thermodynamics, a complex system with very many interacting degrees of freedom recovers certain simplicity in its macroscopic or statistical behavior. Thus as we proceed with the development of Statistical Genetics (i.e. of a quantitative description for the structure of gene

Evolution works through natural selection that acts on genetic variation. A mounting body of evidence suggests that large populations harbor a great deal of such “selectable” variation. This implies that in order to understand how genetic variants (a.k.a. polymorphisms) spread through populations, theoretical models must account for interactions between polymorphisms at different genetic loci and in different individuals. The problem is further encumbered by the effect of sex and recombination that reshuffle polymorphisms between individual genomes. Yet, this “many-body problem” of evolutionar