Copyright © 2013 Charles J. Mode et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The stochastic process under consideration is intended to be not only part of the working paradigm of evolutionary and population genetics but also that of applied probability and stochastic processes with an emphasis on computer intensive methods. In particular, the process is an age-structured self-regulating multitype branching process with a genetic component consisting of an autosomal locus with two alleles for females and males. It is within this simple context that mutation will be quantified in terms of probabilities that a given allele mutates to the other per meiosis. But, unlike many models that are currently being used in mathematical population genetics, in which natural selection is often characterized in terms of parameters called fitness by genotype or phenotype, in this paper the parameterization of submodules of the model provides a framework for characterizing natural selection in terms of some of its components. One of these modules consists of reproductive success that is quantified in terms of the total expected number of offspring a female contributes to the population throughout her fertile years. Another component consists of survival probabilities that characterize an individual’s ability to compete for limited environmental resources. A third module consists of a parametric function that expresses the probabilities of survival in a birth cohort of individuals by age for both females and males. A forth module of the model as an acceptance matrix of conditional probabilities such female may show a preference for the genotype or phenotype as her male sexual partner. It is assumed that any force of natural selection acts at the level of the three genotypes under consideration for each sex. By assigning values of the parameters in each of the modules under consideration, it is possible to conduct Monte Carlo simulation experiments designed to study the effects of each component of selection separately or in any combination on a population evolving from a given initial population over some specified period of time.