| Abstract: |
There is growing interest in applying nonlinear methods
to evolutionary biology. With good reason: the living world
is full of nonlinearities, responsible for steady states,
regular oscillations, and chaos in biological systems.
Evolutionists may find nonlinear dynamics important in
studying short-term dynamics of changes in genotype
frequency, and in understanding selection and its
constraints. More speculatively, dynamical systems theory
may be important because nonlinear fluctuations in some
traits may sometimes be favoured by selection, and because
some long-run patterns of evolutionary change could be
described using these methods.
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