Yoichi Ishida
In population genetics, genetic drift as a phenomenon refers to non-directional or random changes in the frequency of types, such as alleles or genotypes, in a population. In its pure form, drift occurs in a population of finite size in the absence of any other evolutionary factors, such as selection, mutation, and migration. Both in biology and philosophy of biology, the common way of thinking about drift is in terms of random sampling. For example, each generation of a population of diploid organisms (like us) is thought to be a relatively small sample drawn randomly from an infinitely large pool of gametes produced by the previous generation of organisms. Because each generation may be an unrepresentative sample from the large pool of gametes, the allele frequency in a population may change randomly from generation to generation. In the paper I’m co-authoring with Alirio Rosales (UBC), we challenge this sampling-based thinking and suggest a viable alternative. This WIP talk will present our basic idea, and I will try to make it accessible to those without any detailed knowledge of population genetics or philosophy of biology.
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