markovian
Orr HA 2010 The population genetics of beneficial mutations. Phil Trans R Soc Lond B 365:1195-1201.
- population genetics arose from the fusion of Darwin's theory of adaptation by natural selection with Mendel's theory of inheritance
- the field has been concerned historically far more with deleterious and, later, with neutral mutations
- Gillespie (1983, 1984) and Kauffman & Levin (1987) introduced models of adaptation in discrete (DNA) sequence space
- in the scenario usually considered, selection is strong (|Ns| > 1, where N is population size and s is a selection coefficient) and mutation is weak (Nu « 1, where u is the per site mutation rate)
- under these so-called strong-selection weak-mutation conditions, the population is essentially made up of a single wild-type DNA sequence
- 2Nu new unique mutations appear per generation
- given reasonably weak selection and equal selection in the two sexes, each beneficial mutation enjoys a probability of fixation of 2hs
- this result, a branching process approximation, is reasonably accurate unless h is close to zero (Moran, 1962)
