The distribution and heritability of many traits depends on numerous loci in the genome. In general, the astronomical number of possible genotypes makes the system with large numbers of loci difficult to describe. Multilocus evolution, however, greatly simplifies in the limit of weak selection and frequent recombination. In this limit, populations rapidly reach Quasi-Linkage Equilibrium (QLE) i...

A central issue in evolutionary quantitative genetics is to understand how genetic variation for quantitative traits is maintained in natural populations. Estimates of genetic variation and of genetic correlations and pleiotropy among multiple traits, inbreeding depression, mutation rates for fitness and quantitative traits and of the strength and nature of selection are all required to evaluat...

Coevolution is relentlessly creating and maintaining biodiversity and therefore has been a central topic in evolutionary biology. Previous theoretical studies have mostly considered coevolution between genetically symmetric traits (i.e. coevolution between two continuous quantitative traits or two discrete Mendelian traits). However, recent empirical evidence indicates that coevolution can occu...

Parallel phenotypic evolution, the independent evolution of the same trait in closely related lineages, is interesting because it tells us about the contribution of natural selection to phenotypic evolution. Haldane and others have proposed that parallel evolution also results from a second process, the similarly biased production of genetic variation in close relatives, an idea that has receiv...

1. Several authors have proposed that inter-speci®c variation in parasitoid life histories can be classi®ed according to a dichotomy of development modes: ectoparasitoids and idiobionts with one suite of traits, and endoparasitoids and koinobionts with an opposing set of traits. 2. The factual evidence for such a dichotomy is presently scant. Here, 10 predictions of the dichotomous hypothesis a...

Maize has been used effectively as a model organism in the development and evaluation of molecular markers for the identification, mapping and manipulation of major genes affecting the expression of quantitative traits in plants. Although quantitative geneticists have recognized the possibility of major loci, the general dogma had emerged that quantitative traits were controlled by many loci, e...

five genotypes of chickpea as a half diallel crossed with each other, in 2008, 5 parents and 10 progenies were planted as randomized complete block design and some traits including days to podding, basal pod height, number of pods per plant, number of double seed pods per plant, number of single seed pods per plant, number of empty pods per plant, seeds per plant and seed yield per plant were e...