Evolutionary genetics and thermodynamics

Weight, height, eye colour or furriness are examples of traits that characterise the physical properties of an organism. Gene expression aims to understand the relationship between these traits and the underlying genetic code. Statistical physics characterises a system of microstates through certain macroscopic variables, energy, temperature etc. With a handful of assumptions a configuration of genes may be regarded as the microstates of macroscopic traits. In this talk, we will show that for a simple model of haploid organisms with biallelic genes, the steady state distribution of a particular, well defined trait is mathematically analogous to the Canonical Boltzmann distribution in statistical physics.