Neutral and Stable Equilibria of Genetic Systems and The
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY ARTICLE published: 19 Decemberprovided by 2012 Frontiers - Publisher Connector doi: 10.3389/fgene.2012.00276 Neutral and stable equilibria of genetic systems and the Hardy–Weinberg principle: limitations of the chi-square test and advantages of auto-correlation functions of allele frequencies Francisco Bosco1,2, Diogo Castro3 and Marcelo R. S. Briones 1,2* 1 Departamento de Microbiologia, Imunologia e Parasitologia, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil 2 Laboratório de Genômica Evolutiva e Biocomplexidade, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil 3 Departamento de Medicina, Disciplina de Infectologia, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Edited by: Since the foundations of Population Genetics the notion of genetic equilibrium (in close Frank Emmert-Streib, Queen’s analogy with Classical Mechanics) has been associated with the Hardy–Weinberg (HW) University Belfast, UK principle and the identification of equilibrium is currently assumed by stating that the HW Reviewed by: 2 Jian Li, Tulane University, USA axioms are valid if appropriate values of $ (p < 0.05) are observed in experiments. Here Timothy Thornton, University of we show by numerical experiments with the genetic system of one locus/two alleles that Washington, USA considering large ensembles of populations the $2-test is not decisive and may lead to *Correspondence: false negatives in random mating populations and false positives in non-random mating Marcelo R. S. Briones, Departamento populations.This result confirms the logical statement that statistical tests cannot be used de Microbiologia, Imunologia e Parasitologia, Universidade Federal de to deduce if the genetic population is under the HW conditions.
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