PopG For Mac

The PopG program simulates the evolution of random-mating populations with two alleles, arbitrary fitnesses of the three genotypes, an arbitrary mutation rate, an arbitrary rate of migration between the replicate populations, and finite population size.

The PopG programs simulate ten simultaneously evolving populations with you specifying the population size, the fitnesses of the three genotypes, the mutation rates in both directions (from A to a and from a to A), and the initial gene frequency.

They also ask for a migration rate among all the populations, which will make their gene frequencies more similar to each other. Much of the time (but not always!) you will want to set this migration rate to zero. In most respects the program is self-explanatory.

When you make a menu selection that causes the program to run, a graph of the gene frequencies of the A allele in each of the populations will be drawn in the window.

Note that the window can be resized, and the graph should adjust to this. There will also be a dashed curve that shows what the gene frequencies would be in an infinite population (one with no genetic drift).

The graph can be printed using the Print option of the File menu, or saved to a Postscript file using the Save option in that menu.

Please be aware of the fact that once the plot of the gene frequency curves reaches the right-hand side of the graph, the program prints there the number of populations that fixed for the A allele (ended up with a frequency of 1.0) and the number that lost this allele.

Note: PopG is cross-platform and it works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.