A Genealogical Description of the Infinitely-Many Neutral Alleles Model

Kingman [8], [9] introduced the coalescent as a means of describing the genealogy of samples taken from a large evolving haploid population. The coalescent partitions a sample of genes into equivalence classes with respect to an ancestral population some time t into the past; genes in the same equivalence class in the sample have the same ancestors. As t increases the equivalence classes coalesce until, sufficiently far in the past, all individuals in the sample are equivalent, being descended from a common ancestor.