Thanks so much to @adamrutherford.bsky.social, Alex Aylward and Mark Thomas for the fantastic supervision and making this a great first PhD project!

As a geneticist by training it was daunting setting out to write a paper about the history of science, but it has been really thought provoking considering how theoretical models are conceived and what embedded assumptions we continue to apply.

The history of panmixia is a 200 yr tour from Darwin to the usual PopGen suspects - Galton, Pearson, Hardy and Fisher. We argue that the assumption of random mating wasn’t just a mathematical simplification and had already become embedded in the field by the Modern Synthesis.

One of the most common assumptions in population genetics models is that organisms mate with each other totally at random (or “panmixia”). However this almost certainly isn’t the case in nature, so we wanted to find out where this assumption came from.

Much of how we study evolution and the genetic diversity in nature is through mathematical models. These simplify the complexity of the natural world by making assumptions about it.