Asexual Haploid Populations

Abstract

The study of haploid populations in this chapter will enable us to formulate and analyze without the additional complication of mating and Mendelian segregation and recombination many of the problems that concern us. If alleles are interpreted as genotypes and mutation rates refer to zygotes rather than alleles, the formalism applies, regardless of ploidy, also to asexual species, such as the dandelion. As explained in Chap. 3, it applies also to a Y-linked locus in sexually reproducing diploids. We shall expound the basic selection model with discrete nonoverlapping generations in Sect. 2.1, include mutation and migration in Sects. 2.2 and 2.3, and treat overlapping generations in continuous time in Sect. 2.4. We shall discuss random drift briefly in Sect. 2.5.