Can We Reconstruct Evolution's Hidden History?—A Conversation with Colin LaMont

In this episode of Genetics in Your World, GSA Early Career Scientist Multimedia Subcommittee co-chair Anindya Ganguly and member Racheal Asaolu interview Colin LaMont of University of Oslo. They discuss LaMont's work which presents a new mathematical method for calculating how strongly selection favors a genetic variant directly from an evolutionary tree, without knowledge of exact population history, finding that ancestral lineages act like strategists anticipating future selection rather than just responding to it in the moment. Read his paper titled, "Optimal control and the dynamics of ancestral lineages," published in the August 2026 issue of GENETICS: https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyag122 Music: Loopster Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/#PopGen #PopulationGenetics #NaturalSelection #phylogenetics #evolution #EvolutionaryDynamics Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.