I have been interested in the statistical aspects of Darwinian Evolution for quite some time. I first considered the structure of asexual [1] and sexual [2,3] population under neutral evolution, and found interesting parallels with the statistical physics of disorderd systems.
I then considered the effects of Natural selection within the well understood formalism of the Quasispecies (QS) equation [4]. We were able to find some interesting cases in which the quasispecies equation exhibits a phase transition (the error threshold), from a regime dominated by selection effects to an essentially neutral regime [5,6]. We clarified the nature of the transition from the ``thermodynamical'' point of view.
More recently I found a generalization of the formalism by which the quasispecies equation can act as a bridge between the ``microscopic'' (sequence-space) point of view (preferred in molecular evolution approaches) and the ``macroscopic'' (or phenotypic) point of view, which is closer to naturalistic approaches [7]. This approach can also be used to investigate the effects of mutation on evolutionary games [8]. In these works, I heavily rely on the analogy between the QS and (quantum) statistical mechanics.
I am also author of a minireview on the statistical physics approach to Darwinian evolution, which is unpublished, but available on the Web [9].
