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The coalescent

Published on June 30, 2022   42 min

Other Talks in the Series: Introduction to Evolutionary Biology

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0:00
Hi. I'm Peter Beerli. I'm faculty in the Department of Scientific Computing at the Florida State University, and I will talk to you about the coalescent.
0:13
You might wonder, "The coalescent, what?" If you look at the dictionary, then we think about maybe streams that coalesce in the bigger streams or puddles that coalesce in a bigger puddle and I don't think that gives a lot of information about what I want to talk to you.
0:31
To talk a little bit about coalescence theory, I have to do a tour about how we think about biological processes, how we think about modelling these biological processes and we use essentially a whole field in biology, population genetics to talk about that, and then, I will try to highlight coalescence theory, which is part of population genetics and in about 1982 (the early '90s), it revolutionized population genetics and is now used for a lot of explanations about biology. To do that, I will talk about three things. I would talk about data and models. I will talk about population genetics, but in particular, I will introduce how we will model populations using particular achievement of Sewall Wright and Sir Ronald Fisher. Then I will talk about the coalescent in detail, and will give at the end an example of how we could use coalescence theory to actually make everyday inferences.