Approximate Bayesian Computation

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, I’m going to complicate things even further. The Nielsen-Wakely-Hey [5, 3, 4] approach is very flexible and very powerful, but even it doesn’t cover all possible scenarios. It allows for non-equilibrium scenarios in which the populations from which we sampled diverged from one another at different times, but suppose that we think our populations have dramatically increased in size over time (as in humans) or dramatically changed their distribution (as with an invasive species). Is there a way to use genetic data to gain some insight into those processes? Would I be asking that question if the answer were “No”?