Understanding the Forces that Shape Evolution

Abstract

Evolution by natural selection is shaped by many forces, such as clonal interference, demographic factors, and epistasis. Understanding and inferring these factors is not only central for our ability to make predictions about populations’ evolutionary futures, but also give insight into biological processes. In this thesis, I describe work on two factors that shape evolution. First, in Chapter 1, I describe a new statistic for distinguishing Kingman coalescent processes from the more complicated multiple- merger coalescents. In Chapter 2, I describe an experiment to uncover pleiotropic patterns in the genotype-to-phenotype map in budding yeast. Finally, in Chapter 3, I discuss the technical details of genotype-phenotype mapping and a biological interpretation of the algorithm.