The central aims of my work to date have been: 1) to seek statistical properties of populations and evolutionary processes that are robust to the properties of their constituents, in the spirit of statistical mechanics, 2) to explore the effects of genetic linkage on these properties and on the evolution of mutation rates, and 3) to apply my findings in these areas to the ecology/evolution of infectious diseases under immune surveillance and the improvement of treatment strategies. Perhaps my main contribution has been to formalize the "clonal interference" phenomenon, evaluate its quantitative effects, and derive its statistical signature (a signature of asexuality).