ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Price's equation made clear.
Review 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 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Foundations of Ecological and Evolutionary Change.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- A generalized Price equation for fuzzy set-mappings.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2025Article
- Article
- A mathematical description of fossilization.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Multiscale selection in spatially structured populations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Evolution of the connectivity and indispensability of a transferable gene: the simplicity hypothesis.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Kin selection theory and the design of cooperative crops.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Why genetic selection to reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases is way more promising than currently believed.Genetics · 2021Article
- Review
- Different perspectives on non-genetic inheritance illustrate the versatile utility of the Price equation in evolutionary biology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Fifty years of the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Price's equation provides a very simple-and very general-encapsulation of evolutionary change. It forms the mathematical foundations of several topics in evolutionary biology, and has also been applied outwith evolutionary biology to a wide range of other scientific disciplines. However, the equation's combination of simplicity and generality has led to a number of misapprehensions as to what it is saying and how it is supposed to be used. Here, I give a simple account of what Price's equation is, how it is derived, what it is saying and why this is useful. In particular, I suggest that Price's equation is useful not primarily as a predictor of evolutionary change but because it provides a general theory of selection. As an illustration, I discuss some of the insights Price's equation has brought to the study of social evolution. This article is part of the theme issue 'Fifty years of the Price equation'.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.