Very brief thoughts for this week, as my brain is off on a different planet due to some personal stuff, so I haven’t really been in the mindset for nice crunchy analytical thinking for the last few days. So I thought I’d share a point that came up in a conversation between Yana and me on the bus to Safeway last Thursday to go pick up drinks. We were discussing the relationship between drift and neutral evolution, as the two ideas are conflated. Drift, in population genetics, is specifically related to the frequency of alleles already established in a population, rather than dealing with novel mutations. We tend to think of evolution as being strictly about novel mutations, but different alleles of a gene are essentially established mutations within a population. In this sense, drift is basically a subset of neutral evolution – change without selection pressure.

Also completely unrelated, but I had a moment of nerdy glee when I was looking for resources for my proposal and found that Koerner has a book called ‘Is there a universal grammar of religion?’. Sadly it is currently checked out, but I’ll get my hands on it eventually!