Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Across the gap

RAPID EVOLUTIONARY ESCAPE BY LARGE POPULATIONS FROM LOCAL FITNESS PEAKS IS LIKELY IN NATURE:

individually deleterious but jointly beneficial. Such epistasis gives rise to multiple peaks on the genotypic fitness landscape…Here we develop an analytic expression for Ncrit, the critical population size that defines the boundary between these regimes, which shows that both are likely to operate in nature. Frequent recombination may disrupt high-fitness escape genotypes produced in populations larger than Ncrit before they reach fixation, defining a third regime whose rate again slows with increasing population size. We develop a novel expression for this critical recombination rate, which shows that in large populations the simultaneous fixation of mutations that are beneficial only jointly is unlikely to be disrupted by genetic recombination if their map distance is on the order of the size of single genes. Thus, counterintuitively, mass selection alone offers a biologically realistic resolution to the problem of evolutionary escape from local fitness peaks in natural populations.

Please note I’m not making assertions about the ubiquity of these novel processes. I suspect they play a role in speciation, but I won’t wager any guesses beyond that.

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