Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Affiliates 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 ICAM-LANL 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Colloquia 
 Colloquia Archive 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 CMS Colloquia 
 Q-Mat Seminars 
 Q-Mat Seminars Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Kac Lectures 
 Kac Fellows 
 Dist. Quant. Lecture 
 Ulam Scholar 
 Colloquia 
 
 Jobs 
 Postdocs 
 CNLS Fellowship Application 
 Students 
 Student Program 
 Visitors 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Monday, March 16, 2015
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Colloquium

Emergent simplicity of evolutionary dynamics and the possibility of predicting evolutionary future

Boris Shraiman
University of California, Santa Barbara

Evolution works through natural selection that acts on genetic variation and a mounting body of evidence suggests that large populations harbor a great deal of such “selectable” variation. This fact presents a challenge to the molecular genetics approach to evolution, built on the assumption that the latter is driven by infrequent large effect mutations, which can be identified and studied one at a time. On the other hand, evolutionary dynamics driven by the collective effect of numerous polymorphisms at different genetic loci, each of which with only a small individual contribution, lends itself to a “Statistical Genetics” approach inspired by Statistical Mechanics. The talk will explain how this StatMech-driven approach leads to a predictive theory of evolutionary dynamics in rapidly evolving asexual populations and will demonstrate its capacity to predict, based on a sample of genomic sequences, the emerging strain of seasonal Influenza virus.

Host: Robert Ecke