non-credit workshop | Other 2023
Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics Workshop 2023
Dates of instruction: Monday, June 4 – Friday, June 9, 2023 (5 full days)
The workshop will take place at Friday Harbor Laboratories of the University of Washington
Max students: 30
Application deadline: March 31, 2023, 5:00pm Pacific Time
The application form will be found here.
The web pages for the workshop will be found here.
This workshop has been given yearly since 2011, except for 2020. Since 2017 it has been given at the Friday Harbor Laboratories of the University of Washington, on San Juan Island.
Owing to the pandemic, the 2020 workshop was cancelled, and the 2021 and 2022 workshops took place online. The 2023 workshop will be held in-person.
The workshop will review the basics of theory in the field of evolutionary quantitative genetics and its connections to evolution observed at various time scales. One aim of the workshop is to build a bridge between the traditionally separate disciplines of quantitative genetics and comparative methods.
Quantitative genetic theory for natural populations was developed considerably in the period from 1970 to 1990 and up to the present, and it has been applied to a wide range of phenomena including the evolution of life history traits, plasticity of traits, mating preferences, as well as the evolution of body size and other morphological measurements. Phylogenetic approaches to comparative biology were developed from the 1980s on, including inferring how traits covary in evolution and how optimum values of traits vary between species. Textbooks have been slow to cover these developments, and currently few universities offer courses on these subjects aimed at evolutionary biologists.
Evolutionary biologists need to understand this field because of the ability to collect large amounts of data by computer, the development of statistical methods for changes of traits on evolutionary trees and for changes in a single species through time, and the realization that quantitative characters will not soon be fully explained by genomics. This workshop aims to fill this need by reviewing basic aspects of theory and illustrating how that theory can be tested with data, both from single species and from multiple-species phylogenies. Participants will use R, an open-source statistical programming language, to build and test evolutionary models.
(Please note carefully that this is not a workshop on numerical, statistical, or computational methods for reconstructing phylogenies, nor does it cover molecular genomics).
The workshop involves lectures, discussions and in-class computer exercises. You can consult the 2019 and 2022 workshop websites for examples, using the links found at the in the workshop website mentioned above.
This year’s workshop will have a similar structure to the 2019 workshop.
The intended participants for this workshop are graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty members in evolutionary biology. The workshop can accommodate up to 30 participants.
The organizers of the workshop are Stevan Arnold of Oregon State University and
Joe Felsenstein of the University of Washington. In-person lecturers will be:
* Patrick Carter, Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman
* Joe Felsenstein, Genome Sciences / Biology, University of Washington
* Adam Jones, Biological Sciences, University of Idaho
* Fabio Machado, Integrative Biology, Oklahoma State University
* Samantha Price, Biological Sciences, Clemson University
* Jacqueline Sztepanacz, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto
Stevan Arnold will give on-line lectures.
The cost is $1100 + tax. The fee pays for housing accommodations, meals, lecturer expenses, IT support and administration expenses. The fee is to be paid to Friday Harbor Laboratories after the participant’s application has been accepted and the participant has confirmed that they will attend. Details of payment by credit card or check will be provided once the applicant has been admitted to attend.
Here are links to previous years’ workshops, with pages for the individual lectures, including lecture projections, audio recordings, and files for computer exercises.
This workshop is co-sponsored by The American Society of Naturalists, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Society for the Study of Evolution.
