Modelling Evolution

The basic challenge of mathematical population genetics is to understand the relative importance of the different forces of evolution in shaping the genetic diversity that we see in the world around us. This is a problem that has been around for a century, and a great deal is known. However, a proper understanding of the role of a population's spatial structure is missing. Recently we introduced a new framework for modelling populations that evolve in a spatial continuum. In this talk we briefly describe this framework before outlining some preliminary results on the importance of spatial structure for natural selection.