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The Price equation was derived by George R. Price, and describes evolutionary change in a population. The equation provides insight in various evolutionary problems by partitioning evolutionary change in two components; expectation of characters in a population and covariance across the individuals in the population. Assume a population whose elements are labeled i, whose frequency in the population is qi. Element i has fitness wi and some character zi. Price's equation expresses the change of , the mean of characters z with
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where and represent the covariance across individuals in the population, and the expectation of change, respectively.
If zi=wi, then Price's equation reformulates Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection.
References
- Frank, S.A. (1995) George Price's contributions to Evolutionary Genetics. Journal of Theoretical Biology 175:373-388 abstract - full text, pdf 412 KB
- Grafen, M. (2000). Developments of the Price equation and natural selection under uncertainty. Proc. R. Soc. London B 267, 1223-1227.
- Price, G.R. (1970). Selection and covariance. Nature 227:520-521.
- Price, G.R. (1972). Fisher's "fundamental theorem" made clear. Annals of Human Genetics 36:129-140
population genetics
