Upper School STEM Teacher Douglas McNally Published in International Journal of Organic Evolution

Indian Creek congratulates Upper School S.T.E.M. teacher Douglas McNally for his recent publication in the International Journal of Organic Evolution.  Mr. McNally's article "Evolution in alternating environments with tunable interlandscape correlations," co-authored by peers Jeff Maltas and Kevin B. Wood, was published in the Journal's November edition. 

Mr. McNally's research examines how the evolved fitness of an asexually reproducing population is influenced by rapidly switching environments. The results were obtained by formulating the evolutionary dynamics of the population as a simple Markov chain (a type of mathematical model that has broad application to many real-world statistical processes). This approach allowed for the efficient calculation of time-dependent genotype distributions and enabled the researchers to investigate adaptation of the population to ensembles of landscape pairs with various levels of epistasis and fitness correlations. (Spoiler alert: "Switching between these landscape pairs, depending on the ruggedness of the landscape and the inter-landscape correlation can either increase or decrease steady‐state fitness relative to evolution in single environments.")

The full article can be viewed on the International Journal of Organic Evolution's Wiley Online Library or as a bioRxiv preprint at this link.
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Indian Creek school is a co-educational, college preparatory independent school, located in Crownsville, Maryland.  Students in Pre-K3 through grade 12 receive a vibrant educational experience based on excellent academics steeped in strong student-teacher connections.