Mathematical Properties of Population-Genetic Statistics : Quadratic Forms Most Beautiful

A powerful new approach to interpreting population-genetic data in evolution and ecologyPopulation genetics uses statistical analysis to catalog genetic variation among populations and species.Summary statistics computed from allele frequencies-mathematical functions that measure features of genetic similarity and diversity-are key to this global effort.Yet despite their widespread use in evolutionary biology, ecology, and conservation biology, their mathematical properties have largely been overlooked.This book shows how to use the mathematical bounds on summary statistics to make better interpretations of population-genetic data. Noah Rosenberg discusses how the behavior of these statistics depends not only on the biology of the populations they seek to describe but also on the mathematical properties of the functions used to compute them, properties that produce constraints on the values of the statistics and influence their interpretation.Focusing on the concept of homozygosity-a q