Price's equation made clear
Abstract
Price's equation provides a very simple—and very general—encapsulation of evolutionary change. It forms the mathematical foundations of several topics in evolutionary biology, and has also been applied outwith evolutionary biology to a wide range of other scientific disciplines. However, the equation's combination of simplicity and generality has led to a number of misapprehensions as to what it is saying and how it is supposed to be used. Here, I give a simple account of what Price's equation is, how it is derived, what it is saying and why this is useful. In particular, I suggest that Price's equation is useful not primarily as a predictor of evolutionary change but because it provides a general theory of selection. As an illustration, I discuss some of the insights Price's equation has brought to the study of social evolution. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’.
Citation
Gardner , A 2020 , ' Price's equation made clear ' , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. B, Biological Sciences , vol. 375 , no. 1797 , 20190361 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0361
Publication
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. B, Biological Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-8436Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
Funding: UK Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellowship (NE/K009524/1); European Research Council Consolidator Grant (771387).Collections
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