Wednesday November 28, 2001 3:05 pm JWB 208
TITLE: Integrating Ecology and Evolution: Numerical Results from a Quantitative Genetic Recursion Model
ABSTRACT:
Recent evolutionary theory has emphasized "evolutionary dynamics", which has the goal to model evolution in ecological contexts. A wide variety of formalisms and approaches have been used, and I briefly review some of these approaches and the major results. I will then describe in detail an approach based on quantitative genetic recursion models. These are integro-difference equations in which fitness is modeled as a combination of ecological processes producing selection forces in the form of convolution integrals over phenotype space. I will present numerical results for a model of body size co-evolution among a predator and one and two prey. The main result is that the evolutionary dynamics have complex behavior and appear to reside on a strange attractor.
For more information contact J. Keener, 1-6089