Illustrating Darwin's Principle of Divergence

October 10, 2011

In my work on flu I've been trying to build joint evolutionary and epidemiological models, where natural selection emerges dynamically from influenza strains competing for susceptible hosts. In speaking on this, I found it useful to broaden the context a bit. Here, you can think very generally of genetic / ecological variants competing with one another in some sort of ecological space. Variants that are close together in this space strongly compete, while more distant variants exist more-or-less independently.

This is exactly the model that Darwin used to illustrate the Origin of Species. Here, I've described this idea in a bit more detail and built a visualization of the model.

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