Talk:Population genetics

Human Genome Epidemiology Network, or HuGENet™ is a global collaboration of individuals and organizations committed to the assessment of the impact of human genome variation on population health and how genetic information can be used to improve health and prevent disease. Find out more at http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/hugenet/default.htm Lid6 17:45, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

The Coalescent

Given that all (well, most) modern population genetics revolves around coalesence theory (The Coalescent), there really ought to be a page....There is (for example) already a page on Ewens's sampling formula --DJO 22:24, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Except that the word the should probably not be included in the article title, and if it's included, coalescent should probably have a lower-case initial c. Michael Hardy 22:50, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Point taken - I think that since people usually refer to The Coalescent, it should probably be The coalescent in Wikipedia, or even better Coalescence theory--DJO 08:21, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I prefer coalescence (genetics). - Samsara 00:28, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Mayr and Dobzhansky

Would it be inappropriate to link Mayr and Dobzhansky as founders of the modern synthesis (maybe Huxley too?), unless you consider them too recent...Slrubenstein

Not at all, but I think that should be on the modern synthesis page, as neither Mayr nor Dobzhansky developed population genetics theory themselves very much (although they obviously did use population genetics). In fact we should probably reword the page, population genetics didn't really "spring" from the modern synthesis, but the other way around, pop gen was an ingredient in the modern synthesis, along with biometrics, paleontology, systematics etc. Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (Sinauer 1997) has a very nice breakdown of the contributions of various areas of biology to the modern synthesis. -- Lexor 22:33 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Recruiting for Wikibooks Biology book(s)

Warm greetings from sister project Wikibooks where I am writing a general biology textbook all by my lonesome. My profs donated a sizable bunch of notes that make up the structure of an entire introductory biology book. However these notes are in outline form and need to be fleshed out into full text. Then, some images .. I am confident that this will become the standard college text over time but need some help to get it there. --karlwick

Should this article get merged with quantitative genetics ???

No! Quantitative genetics is a study of the genetic basis of complex (i.e. multi-gene) traits. This may be evolutionary, but more often that not is in terms of artificial breeding/selection. Population genetics is a study of the causes and effects of genetic variation within (and between) populations.--DJO 21:56, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Dysgenics

It'd be nice if the "dysgenics" article could have a better explanation of it's status in current population genetics. I've looked up some stuff at a library, but didn't find anything much :-P I can't tell if it's an avoided subject, something disproved ages ago, or just something nobody cares much about. Flammifer

I've made it a genetics stub. - Samsara 14:08, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Epistasis - nearly non-stub

Dear All,

I've done a considerable amount of work on the epistasis article today (compared to what was there previously). I am hopeful that we can let it stand as a proper article rather than a stub if one more person who knows anything about it puts in an equivalent amount of work. I'll try and find a few published references for it. Please edit away, and make suggestions on the talk page as to what else might be included. Genetic interactions (where some of the original material contributed to epistasis has found a new home) could perhaps be improved at the same time. Thanks. - Samsara 14:01, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Math

there's also a considerable amount of math behind population genetics. It would perhaps be useful to include some formuli.

External Links

The basic science of public health genomics is "human genome epidemiology," the set of methods for collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing data on the distribution of gene variants, gene-disease associations, and gene-environment and gene-gene interactions. Population-based epidemiologic studies are the basis for estimating the absolute, relative, and attributable risks that gauge the effects of genomic factors on the health of individuals and populations. Find out more at http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/population.htm

Overpopulation Inbreeding

Overpopulation Inbreeding is a fifth aspect of population genetics which is missing from all the models described so far in the article. It was developed by Wade Gielzecki.

Illustration of the population genetics: Take a population of couples that have a random number of children. There are no restraints on growth to the population. The average number of children per generation the couples have is 2, the maximum is 4 which say is had by one couple only. In the second generation the children in the 4 child family mate with children from 2 child families and these new couples produce 3 children each, whereas the rest of the population again has an average of 2 children. In the third generation, the 12 children in this largest family line are under evolutionary pressure to inbreed, because if they do they will have 3.5 children on average, whereas otherwise they will have only 2.5 children on average. The more generations pass, the more often inbreeding accelerates the growth of the largest family. Natural defenses to inbreeding built up in circumstances of restricted growth are lost to the inbred line. A syndrome develops where the inbred line rejects non-relatives as mates. The largest line overwhelms the rest of the population until the population is far more homozygous (inbred) than it was at the start.

In n generations a subset of the population having c children has offspring on the order of c to the n th power. The subset with the most children outnumbers the rest of the population in not many generations, making the population completely inbred.

This inclusion to population genetics is backed up: 1) Human first cousin marriages indeed produce more children than average. 2) Studies of human genetic variation find no subheterogeniety within races. 3) Aboriginals are relatively outbred. 4) Other primates than man are far more outbred. (eg. Chimpanzees have 10 times the heterozygosity of man.) 5) Dysgenia studies find human dysgenia has consistently been the case for the last century except for the World War II years when the population grew explosively in the last century.

This genetics model predicts declines and long periods of stability whereas natural selection does not. It is an additional factor to existing models postulating genes for the number of offspring humans and other animals have. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.137.217.177 (talk) 20:30, 8 March 2011 (UTC)