Jeremy (one of the students in the lab) acts as a moderator at the Ask Science reddit, helping answer questions on evolution, genetics, and genomics. I thought I’d post a link to a nice response of his to the question: “Why do we use the Hardy Weinberg equilibrium if it never in fact occurs in nature?”. In his response he explains how Hardy Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) is really quite a robust and useful expression. Also he links to some of the tools we’ve been developing to illustrate population genetics concepts such as HWE (see here for more).

As a quick postscript my dictation software often misinterprets the phrase “Hardy Weinberg” as “Hardly the wind blew”, which is really quite a poetic substitution.