Lab Home | Phone | Search
	Center for Nonlinear Studies
	Home  ▶ People   Current   Executive Committee   Postdocs   Visitors   Students   Research   Publications  ▶ Conferences   Workshops   Sponsorship  ▶ Talks   Seminars   Postdoc Seminars Archive   Quantum Lunch   Quantum Lunch Archive   P/T Colloquia   Archive   Ulam Scholar     Postdoc Nominations  ▶ Student Requests   Student Program  ▶ Visitor Requests   Description   Past Visitors  ▶ Services   General     History of CNLS     Maps, Directions   CNLS Office   T-Division   LANL				Monday, March 16, 20153:00 PM - 4:00 PMCNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690) Colloquium Emergent simplicity of evolutionary dynamics and the possibility of predicting evolutionary future Boris ShraimanUniversity 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