Coalescence in the recent past in rapidly growing populations

Abstract

In a rapidly growing population one expects that two individuals chosen at random from the nth generation are unlikely to be closely related if n is large. In this paper it is shown that for a broad class of rapidly growing populations this is not the case. For a Galton–Watson branching process with an offspring distribution {pj} such that p0=0 and ψ(x)=∑jpjI{j≥x} is asymptotic to x−αL(x) as x→∞ where L(⋅) is slowly varying at ∞ and 0<α<1 (and hence the mean m=∑jpj=∞) it is shown that if Xn is the generation number of the coalescence of the lines of descent backwards in time of two randomly chosen individuals from the nth generation then n−Xn converges in distribution to a proper distribution supported by N={1,2,3,…}. That is, in such a rapidly growing population coalescence occurs in the recent past rather than the remote past. We do show that if the offspring mean m satisfies 1<m≡∑jpj<∞ and p0=0 then coalescence time Xn does converge to a proper distribution as n→∞, i.e., coalescence does take place in the remote past.