The development of demographic studies in anthropology is directly linked to the success of population genetics. The anthropodemographic or anthropogenetic approach is thus underpinned by questions of genetics. While demographers focus on population dynamics and renewal in quantitative terms, population geneticists refer not to individuals but to the sets of genes carried by individuals in a po...

Pneumoviruses are responsible for significant respiratory disease in their hosts and represent a major problemfor human and animal health. Pneumoviruses are members of the family Paramyxoviridae, subfamilyPneumovirinae and the virus particles consist of a negative-sense, nonsegmented RNA genome within a helical nucleocapsid structure enveloped in a lipid membrane derived from the ho...

The status of population genetics, a mathematical version of evolutionary theory, has become hotly debated among biologists and philosophers. Many seem to view population genetics as unchanged since the Modern Synthesis (i.e., since the 1940s), and have argued that subjects such as development were left out of the Synthesis. Some have called for an extended evolutionary synthesis or for recogni...

Research in population genetics theory has two main strands. The first is deterministic theory, where random changes in allelic frequencies are ignored and attention focuses on the evolutionary effects of selection and mutation. The second strand, stochastic theory, takes account of these random changes and thus is more complete than deterministic theory. This essay is one in the series of Pers...

The nature of fitness interactions is an important, yet unsolved, question in population genetics. We compare the egg-to-adult viability of individuals homozygous for either a second or a third chromosome with the viability of individuals homozygous for both chromosomes simultaneously. On the average, the viability of the two-chromosome homozygotes is somewhat greater than expected assuming tha...

Selective sweeps affect neutral genetic diversity through hitchhiking. While this effect is limited to the local genomic region of the sweep in panmictic populations, we find that in spatially-extended populations the combined effects of many unlinked sweeps can affect patterns of ancestry (and therefore neutral genetic diversity) across the whole genome. Even low rates of sweeps can be enough ...

Strong reciprocity, defined as a predisposition to help others and to punish those that are not helping, has been proposed as a potent force leading to the evolution of cooperation and altruism. However, the conditions under which strong reciprocity might be favored are not clear. Here we investigate the selective pressure on strong reciprocity by letting both limited dispersal (i.e., spatial s...

We study the longtime behaviour of interacting systems in a randomly uctuating (space{ time) medium and focus on models from population genetics. There are two prototypes of spatial models in population genetics: spatial branching processes and interacting Fisher{Wright diiusions. Quite a bit is known on spatial branching processes where the local branching rate is proportional to a random envi...

to study molecular evolutionary characteristics and genetics of beet necrotic yellow vein virus (bnyvv) isolates population from iran, nucleotide sequences of p25 and coat protein (cp) were determined and the amino acids sequences thus deduced were analyzed using phylogenetic and population genetics methods. a survey of bnyvv in iran indicated the infection of 288 collected samples out of 392 s...

In a former study based on US census data, we found that educational homogamy is common and reduces the odds to remain childless. This study takes the next step and examines the prevalence of educational homogamy and its association with childlessness as well as the number of children on a worldwide basis. We analyzed census data from 41 different countries encompassing a total of 2,179,736 mar...