ArticleGenetics2018
Selection-Like Biases Emerge in Population Models with Recurrent Jackpot Events.
Article in Genetics, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Ecological diversification in rapidly evolving populations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Accounting for Chimerism in Demographic Inference: Reconstructing the History of Common Marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) from High-Quality, Whole-Genome, Population-Level Data.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
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- Asynchronous abundance fluctuations can drive giant genotype frequency fluctuations.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
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- Asynchronous abundance fluctuations can drive giant genotype frequency fluctuations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A dynamical limit to evolutionary adaptation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Proliferating active matter.Nature reviews. Physics · 2023Review
- Population genetic models for the spatial spread of adaptive variants: A review in light of SARS-CoV-2 evolution.PLoS genetics · 2022Review
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- Recommendations for improving statistical inference in population genomics.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Evolution during primary HIV infection does not require adaptive immune selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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- Genealogical structure changes as range expansions transition from pushed to pulled.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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- Tuning environmental timescales to evolve and maintain generalists.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
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Abstract
Evolutionary dynamics driven out of equilibrium by growth, expansion, or adaptation often generate a characteristically skewed distribution of descendant numbers: the earliest, the most advanced, or the fittest ancestors have exceptionally large number of descendants, which Luria and Delbrück called "jackpot" events. Here, I show that recurrent jackpot events generate a deterministic median bias favoring majority alleles, which is akin to positive frequency-dependent selection (proportional to the log ratio of the frequencies of mutant and wild-type alleles). This fictitious selection force results from the fact that majority alleles tend to sample deeper into the tail of the descendant distribution. The flip side of this sampling effect is the rare occurrence of large frequency hikes in favor of minority alleles, which ensures that the allele frequency dynamics remains neutral in expectation, unless genuine selection is present. The resulting picture of a selection-like bias compensated by rare big jumps allows for an intuitive understanding of allele frequency trajectories and enables the exact calculation of transition densities for a range of important scenarios, including population-size variations and different forms of natural selection. As a general signature of evolution by rare events, fictitious selection hampers the establishment of new beneficial mutations, counteracts balancing selection, and confounds methods to infer selection from data over limited timescales.
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