Evolutionary biologists have long sought to answer questions about the genetic basis of adaptations, the prevalence and impact of different evolutionary forces on variation within species, or when species diverged and how. But only now, with the increasing accessibility of genome-wide data for any organism, can answers to such questions be sought in non-model as well as model species. In my thesis research, I aimed to answer two sets of questions, one related to the prevalence of meiotic drive and other sources of transmission distortion in humans, and the second related to the demographic history and selective forces influencing variation in a non-model organism. These projects both built upon recent technological and methodological advances fueled by human genetics research and demonstrated the prospects of such techniques for future discoveries in the genomic era. *Supplementary Data File 1 (related to Chapter 2) is available as a supplementary file.