In (theoretical) population genetic analyses for diploid organisms it is a customary assumption, which is also built into state-of-the-art statistical tools based on coalescent theory, that unlinked loci have independent evolutionary histories. This is conceptually doubtful because there is after all only one population pedigree, describing the set of reproductive relationships of all individuals for all time, and all genetic information is passed through that same pedigree. In particular, any gene genealogy must be a subset of this pedigree. It is known that for reasonably large and well-mixed populations this issue has little practical ramifications as long as the the variance of offspring numbers among individuals is not too large: the law of the gene genealogies conditioned on the fixed pedigree is then practically the same as its counterpart obtained by (a priori unjustified) averaging over independent copies of the pedigree.

In an article featured in Genetics 226(5), May 2024 https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyae030  researchers including IQCB member Matthias Birkner https://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/birkner/ consider population models with potentially very high variability of offspring numbers among individuals. Here, the situation can be radically different, leading to "bursts" of coalescence triggered by the pedigree at certain times across all loci. This has interesting implications for ancestral inference and understanding of multi-locus data from population(s) (models) whose single-locus genealogies are multiple merger coalescents.

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