Re: Haldane's Dilemma and quantitative genetics

"Perplexed in Peoria" <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e7h3ki$17cl$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For several months, I have been wasting part of my time trying to
understand "cost of substitution" from the viewpoint of population
genetics and/or information theory. But recently, I was struck by the
idea of treating the count of advantageous alleles in an individual
as a quantitative trait, and looking at the rate of change in this
trait using Price's equation and/or the 'Breeder's Equation'.

I'm even more of a novice in quantitative genetics and analysis of
variance than I am in pop-gen, but so far it seems to me that this
approach to the issue is illuminating.

Question for ReMine, Felsenstein, or anyone else familiar with what
ReMine calls "the cost literature": Has anyone published anything
along these lines?


As far as I can tell, looking through ReMine's stuff on the web, it boils
down to the idea that genes cannot increase faster than the rate at which
the organisms increase.

So if we have a population of 4 billion rabbits, and each rabbit can have a
maximum of four offspring, it would take 32 generations for the gene to do a
selective sweep, assuming a selection coefficient of 1. Actually selection
coefficients are usually much lower, but maximum offspring numbers are
rather higher. As the equation illustatres, we are still talking about
hundreds of generations at the most, or, in geological terms, a twinkling of
an eye. The reason is that organisms grow exponentially, so time taken is
logarithmic, and when you take logarithms of big numbers you end up with
small numbers all of about the same size.

If you are interested in time to fixation look at genetic drift in pop gen
models.


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