The Pith: Natural selection comes in different flavors in its genetic constituents. Some of those constituents are more elusive than others. That makes "reading the label" a non-trivial activity.
As you may know when you look at patterns of variation in the genome of a given organism you can make various inferences from the nature of these patterns. But the power of those inferences is conditional on the details of the real demographic and evolutionary histories, as well as the assumptions made about the models one which is testing. When delving into the domain of population genomics some of the concepts and models may seem abstruse, but the reality is that such details are the stuff of which evolution is built. A new paper in PLoS Genetics may seem excessively esoteric and theoretical, but it speaks to very important processes which shape the evolutionary trajectory of a given population. The ...
