Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Rapid biological evolution can alter ecological processes such as demography or predator-prey dynamics. Ecology and evolution can thereby influence each other at timescales as short as a few generations. The idea that evolution by natural selection could be a regular contributor to the contemporary dynamics of living systems has implications that are far reaching, not only for our comprehension of evolutionary processes, but potentially for issues like the biodiversity crisis or the bioecology of human societies. The transition to modernity has produced perhaps the fastest modification ever of the Earth's conditions, coined the "Anthropocene era". The proposed programme aims to study how, in this context, natural selection and demography have interacted to modulate genomes and the mutation load at the scale of a whole (human) population across multiple generations. I will use the FrenchCanadian population from Québec as a model to address these evolutionary questions