Abstract
Just over a year ago, Marc Feldman and I made an assessment of the then-current state of the art of using gene frequencies to test for selective neutrality. This assessment has recently appeared in a review paper (Ewens and Feldman. 1976. (EF in the following)). My purpose here is to summarize briefly the conclusions reached in that paper, and then to discuss the advances that have been made during the last 15 months, so as to give an up-to-date summary of present tests of neutrality, as well as of certain theoretical conclusions which impinge upon these tests. This paper concerns only theoretical problems and no attempt is made at data analysis. Nor is any view offered one way or the other on the neutrality question. The paper may be taken as concerning an extreme point on the spectrum defined by the question of measuring selection, namely, is there any selection at all at the locus we are looking at?
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References
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Ewens, W.J. (1977). Selection and Neutrality. In: Christiansen, F.B., Fenchel, T.M. (eds) Measuring Selection in Natural Populations. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, vol 19. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93071-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93071-3_10
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