Change and maintenance of variation in quantitative traits in the context of the Price equation

The Price equation is a general description of evolutionary change in any character from one generation to the next due to natural selection and other forces such as mutation and recombination. Recently it has been widely utilised in many fields including quantitative genetics, but these applications have focused mainly on the response to selection in the mean of characters. Many different and, in some cases, conflicting models have been investigated by quantitative geneticists to examine the change and maintenance of both genetic and environmental variance of quantitative traits under selection and other forces. In this study, we use the Price equation to derive many such well-known results for the dynamics and equilibria of variances in a straightforward way and to develop them further. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.