Guest
This lecture begins by discussing the apparent conflict between Mendel’s work and Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The resolution to this conflict was achieved eventually through the modern synthesis, which depended on formal methods for modeling gene frequency changes in populations. The lecture goes on to illustrate how the gene pool of a population can be determined for a simple trait. This exercise leads to a discussion of how evolution, formally measured as a change in the relative frequency of genes across generations, can be modeled with a few simple equations. The lecture continues by describing the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, which predicts that evolution will not occur in a sexually reproducing population. The resolution to this apparently paradoxical conclusion comes from understanding that assumptions underlying the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium are typically violated in natural populations.
