Editorial: Evolutionary Feedbacks Between Population Biology and Genome Architecture

Joe Felsenstein famously quipped in 1988 that “systematists and evolutionary geneticists don’t often talk to each other,” laying bare the schism between macroevolutionary thinking, such as building phylogenies, and population genetics (Felsenstein, 1988). Thirty years ago, in its early phase, studies of genome evolution were already beginning to incorporate population genetics
when comparing the DNA of distantly related species (Dover and Flavell, 1982), but the field was far from mature. Today this schism between population genetics and genome evolution is much healed, being bridged by novel statistical methods for detecting natural selection (Kreitman and Akashi, 1995), as well as to the monumental book by Michael Lynch (2007), “The Origins
of Genome Architecture,” which in turn built upon the foundational nearly neutral theory of Tomoko Ohta and Motoo Kimura (Ohta, 1973, 1992). This Frontiers Research Topic celebrates this increasing infusion of population biology perspectives into studies of genome evolution, which has facilitated key advances in our understanding of how eukaryotic and microbial genomes evolve
and the evolutionary forces influencing their structure.