Noisy traveling waves: effect of selection on genealogies

Abstract

For a family of models of evolving population under selection, which can be described by noisy traveling wave equations, the coalescence times along the genealogical tree scale like $\log^\alpha N$, where $N$ is the size of the population, in contrast with neutral models for which they scale like $N$. An argument relating this time scale to the diffusion constant of the noisy traveling wave leads to a prediction for $\alpha$ which agrees with our simulations. An exactly soluble case gives trees with statistics identical to those predicted for mean-field spin glasses in Parisi's theory.