ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
The Price equation and evolutionary epidemiology.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Virulent Parasites Emerge in Hosts With Rising Temperatures.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Evolutionary Invasion Analysis of Modern Epidemics Highlights the Context-Dependence of Virulence Evolution.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2024Article
- Infection burdens and virulence under heat stress: ecological and evolutionary considerations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Challenges for mathematical epidemiological modelling.Anaesthesia, critical care & pain medicine · 2022Article
- The ghost of hosts past: impacts of host extinction on parasite specificity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Fluctuating Environments Maintain Genetic Diversity through Neutral Fitness Effects and Balancing Selection.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Fifty years of the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The Price equation has found widespread application in many areas of evolutionary biology, including the evolutionary epidemiology of infectious diseases. In this paper, we illustrate the utility of this approach to modelling disease evolution by first deriving a version of Price's equation that can be applied in continuous time and to populations with overlapping generations. We then show how this version of Price's equation provides an alternative perspective on pathogen evolution by considering the epidemiological meaning of each of its terms. Finally, we extend these results to the case where population size is small and generates demographic stochasticity. We show that the particular partitioning of evolutionary change given by Price's equation is also a natural way to partition the evolutionary consequences of demographic stochasticity, and demonstrate how such stochasticity tends to weaken selection on birth rate (e.g. the transmission rate of an infectious disease) and enhance selection on mortality rate (e.g. factors, like virulence, that cause the end of an infection). In the long term, if there is a trade-off between virulence and transmission across parasite strains, the weaker selection on transmission and stronger selection on virulence that arises from demographic stochasticity will tend to drive the evolution of lower levels of virulence. This article is part of the theme issue 'Fifty years of the Price equation'.
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