Overview of Evolutionary Biology and Quantitative 
Genetics

Nancy Heckman 
Statistics Department 
University of British Columbia

I will explain, in statistician's terms, some 
basic concepts of genetics, heritability and 
selection for quantitative traits (single-valued, 
vector-valued and function-valued traits).  Many 
questions in evolutionary biology are framed in 
terms of mean vectors and covariance matrices - or 
mean functions and covariance functions in the 
case of function-valued traits.