Population Size, Natural Selection and the Genetic Load

Natural selection and population dynamics.

To what extent, and under which circumstances, are population dynamics influenced by concurrent natural selection? Density dependence and environmental stochasticity are generally expected to subsume any selective modulation of population growth rate, but theoretical considerations point to conditions under which selection can have an appreciable impact on population dynamics. By contrast, empi...

Genetic linkage and natural selection.

The prevalence of recombination in eukaryotes poses one of the most puzzling questions in biology. The most compelling general explanation is that recombination facilitates selection by breaking down the negative associations generated by random drift (i.e. Hill-Robertson interference, HRI). I classify the effects of HRI owing to: deleterious mutation, balancing selection and selective sweeps o...

Optimal Population Size and the Genetic Algorithm

We conduct experiments to determine the optimum population size for problems as the instance size varies. We show that increasing the population size increases the accuracy of the GA. Increasing population size also causes the number of generations to converge to increase. The optimal population for a given problem is the point of inflection where the benefit of quick convergence is offset by i...

Population Genetic Applications Using a Coalescent Simulation including Selection, Recombination, and Variable Population Size

Genetic Algorithms: Artificial Selection vs Natural Selection

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are a stochastic searching and optimizing method inspired by the biological mechanism of natural selection and evolution. To improve the searching power of GAs for complicated problems, many deterministic measures, particularly, experience and/or expert knowledge-based heuristic rules, have been studied in the existing literature. This paper proposes a potentially more ...