The idea of stochastic training wheels sounds a bit scary, but I am alluding to the series of posts on stochastic dynamics adapted from chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies by John Gillespie. Using Gillespie's terminology the posts were: Boundary ProcessOrigination ProcessGenetic DriftGenetic DraftRandom Environment There was also another factor which Gillespie points to, which didn't have a particular section and rather loomed over all the other parameters, and that was Deterministic Selection.
Of Gillespie's parameters only one is highly dependent on the population size, genetic drift. Like R.A. Fisher Gillespie tends to dismiss the impact of drift as a stochastic force, mostly I suspect because it is the one we are taught first. The idea that generation to generation sampling variance is inversely proportional to the sample size is intuitively understandable. Flip a coin enough times and you get a progressively better reflection of the expected ...
