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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.