The Price equation and evolutionary epidemiology

Abstract

The Price equation has found widespread application in many areas of evolutionary biology, including the evolutionary epidemiology of infectious diseases. In this paper, we illustrate the utility of this approach to modelling disease evolution by first deriving a version of Price's equation that can be applied in continuous time and to populations with overlapping generations. We then show how this version of Price's equation provides an alternative perspective on pathogen evolution by considering the epidemiological meaning of each of its terms. Finally, we extend these results to the case where population size is small and generates demographic stochasticity. We show that the particular partitioning of evolutionary change given by Price's equation is also a natural way to partition the evolutionary consequences of demographic stochasticity, and demonstrate how such stochasticity tends to weaken selection on birth rate (e.g.The transmission rate of an infectious disease) and enhance selection on mortality rate (e.g. factors, like virulence, that cause the end of an infection). In the long term, if there is a trade-off between virulence and transmission across parasite strains, the weaker selection on transmission and stronger selection on virulence that arises from demographic stochasticity will tend to drive the evolution of lower levels of virulence. This article is part of the theme issue 'Fifty years of the Price equation.