Punctuated Equilibrium in an ALife speciation simulation
Date and time:
01/07/2009, 14:00
Location:
Building: 26, Room: 135, Clayton campus
Presenters:
Owen Woodberry
Abstract:
The Punctuated Equilibrium hypothesis (Eldredge and Gould,
1972) asserts that most of evolutionary change occurs during
geologically rapid speciation events, with species exhibiting stasis
most of the time. Punctuated Equilibrium is complemented by the
founder effect (Mayr, 1952), which attributes changes in diversity to
a population bottleneck.That is, the initial loss of genetic
variation, which occurs during a foundation bottleneck, may result in
the emergence of a child species which is distinctly different from
the parent species.In this paper we use new statistical measures to
test these effects in an ALife simulation of speciation.
Speaker biographies:
Owen Woodberry is a PhD student at Monash University whose thesis
investigates the potential of evolutionary artificial life simulations
for investigating various biological phenomena.
