Progress in Population Genetics and Human Evolution

I: Early human evolution.- Recent African origin of human mitochondrial DNA: Review of the evidence and current status of the hypothesis.- Lines of descent from mitochondrial Eve: An evolutionary look at coalescence.- Phylogeography of human mtDNA: An Amerindian perspective.- Population structure and modern human origins.- Distribution of pairwise differences in growing populations.- Branching and inference in population genetics.- Human demography and the time since mitochondrial Eve.- II: Molecular techniques and data analysis.- Molecular population genetics of a phenotypically monomorphic protein in Drosophila.- Estimation of the amount of DNA polymorphism and statistical tests of the neutral mutation hypothesis based on DNA polymorphism.- Computational methods for the coalescent.- Applications of Metropolis-Hastings genealogy sampling.- Estimating selection and mutation rates from a random field model for polymorphic sites.- The use of linkage disequilibrium for estimating the recombination fraction between a marker and a disease gene.- Theory and applications of RAPD-PCR: Mispriming.- III: Genealogy and population models.- The structured coalescent.- An ancestral recombination graph.- The effect of purifying selection on genealogies.- Hierarchical and mean-field stepping stone models.- A note on the stepping stone model with extinction and recolonization.- On the normal-selection model.- Branching processes and evolution.

Simon Tavare holds the George and Louise Kawamoto Chair in Biological Sciences and is a Professor of Biological Sciences, Mathematics, and Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. Professor Tavare's research lies at the interface between statistics and biology, specifically focusing on problems arising in molecular biology, human genetics, population genetics, molecular evolution, and bioinformatics. His statistical interests focus on stochastic computation. Among the applications are linkage disequilibrium mapping, stem cell evolution, and inference in the fossil record. Dr. Tavare is also a professor in the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge, England, where his group concentrates on cancer genomics.