CHAOS AND EVOLUTION

There is growing interest in applying nonlinear methods to evolutionar y biology. With good reason: the living world is full of nonlinearitie s, responsible for steady states, regular oscillations, and chaos in b iological systems. Evolutionists may find nonlinear dynamics important in studying short-term dynamics of changes in genotype frequency, and in understanding selection and its constraints. More speculatively, d ynamical systems theory may be important because nonlinear fluctuation s in some traits may sometimes be favored by selection, and because so me long-run patterns of evolutionary change could be described using t hese methods.