"Predicting Evolutionary Trajectories in Sexual Populations"

Daniel Weinreich, Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University

...I will describe a novel definition of the adaptive landscape appropriate for this problem: the vector field reflecting the joint pressures of mutation, selection and recombination over a continuous multidimensional space that represents both allele frequencies and linkage disequilibrium among alleles. Populations are again regarded as occupying a temporal succession of points in the underlying space, and I will illustrate the potential of this approach by describing how recombination influences a population's evolutionary trajectory single- and multi-peaked fitness models.