See reference below for details on parameterization of the models.
Briefly, the general random walk model considers time in discrete steps. The duration of steps does not matter as long as many steps occur between sampled populations. At each time step, an evolutionary change is drawn at random from a distribution of possible evolutionary "steps." It turns out that the long-term dynamics of an evolving lineage depend only on the mean and variance of this step distribution. The former, mstep
, determined the directionality in a sequence and the latter, vstep
, determines its volatility.
The stasis model is based on the parameterization of Sheets and Mitchell (2001). Under this model, there is an evolutionary optimum, theta
, with some amount of true variance, omega
, around this optimum.