History
Coalescent theory is a natural extension of the more classical population genetics concept of neutral evolution and is an approximation to the Fisher-Wright (or Wright-Fisher) model for large populations. It was ‘discovered’ independently by several researchers in the 1980s, but the definitive formalisation is attributed to Kingman. Major contributions to the development of coalescent theory have been made by Peter Donnelly, Robert Griffiths, Richard R Hudson and Simon Tavaré. This has included incorporating variations in population size, recombination and selection. In 1999 Jim Pitman and Serik Sagitov independently introduced coalescent processes with multiple collisions of ancestral lineages. Shortly later the full class of exchangeable coalescent processes with simultaneous multiple mergers of ancestral lineages was discovered by Martin Möhle, Serik Sagitov and Jason Schweinsberg.
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