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0:00
Hello.
My name is Murray Cox and
I'm a research scientist
at Massey University in New Zealand.
Today, I'm going to talk
about population genetics
and more specifically
how population genetics
can be used to study
human evolution.
0:15
So what exactly is
population genetics?
Well, the field of
population genetics
explains how and why genetic
variation exists within a species.
Population genetics provides
an evolutionary framework
that lets us model how
genetic variants change
in frequency through time and space.
This really involves
two different things.
Firstly, sampling
genetic information
from a large number of individuals.
And secondly, developing
a mathematical way
to represent and study
that genetic variation.
0:47
Population genetics
has a long history.
Variation within a species was
important to Charles Darwin.
And a large part of his 1859
book, On the Origin of Species,
was spent talking about the subject.
Darwin was particularly interested
in the wide range of variation
that we see in domesticated
species, His favorite
seems to have been pigeons.
However, Darwin didn't know
anything about genetics.
In 1859, no one did.
Darwin could see that animal
breeds weren't all the same.
But he didn't understand the basic
biology behind those differences.
1:21
Population genetics really
first started in 1900,
when Carl Correns, Erich von
Tschermak, and Hugo de Vries
all independently made the link
between biological variation
and genetic inheritance.
Thomas Hunt Morgan extended research
on entire populations of organisms
in the 1910s.
However, all of this
work was experimental.
The research initially
involved crossbreeding plants.
But later dealt with
fruit flies too,
a somewhat strange choice
of biological system.
But a very tractable organism
and one that is still
studied widely today.
