Exploring the use of ancestry as a unified network model of finite population evolution

Abstract

The evolution of a population is determined by many factors, including the geographic separation of individuals in the population (spatial structure), parent selection via assortative mating (biasing who breeds with whom), environmental gradients, founder effects, disturbance, selection, stochastic effects characterised as genetic drift and so on. Ultimately the interest in studying a population of organisms is about characterising parent selection over time. This paper will examine the evolution of a population under the neutral conditions of genetic drift and for a simple selection model. For drift two conditions are considered: the first is for a range of spatial (geographic) constraints defined by a network; the second is through the use of a tagging system that models assortative mate selection. A simple selection model for the OneMax problem is used to illustrate the response of a population to selection pressure. An ancestry network is constructed representing the shared parent interactions over time. This structure is analyzed as a method for characterising the interactions of a population. The approach demonstrates a unified model to characterise population dynamics, independent of the underlying evolutionary constraints.