Temporal Dynamics

[DeCoredge]

-How does mutation affect coalescence and finding the parent allele?
-How does convergent and divergent evolution play a role in temporal dynamics at discovering the parent allele, and the size of the probability of the population size?

[ajrominger]

Good questions! Here are some answers:

• a really useful property of coalescent modeling is that mutation has no effect on the actual coalescence of alleles, mutation happens independently--that makes modeling a lot easier because we can deal with each process (coalescence and mutation) separately
• if we want to use statistical analyses to infer the sequence of the parent allele, then mutations are very important--we basically would try to use "genetic distance" and coalescence modeling to guess at what that sequence looked like
• convergent and divergent evolution both have the mathematical effect of reducing what's called the effective population size (meaning even if the count of individual organisms is largely unchanged, strong selection of any kind makes the model behave as if the effective population is smaller)
• so selection (whether convergent or divergent) would reduce effective population size, which would reduce genetic diversity