Category: epistasis
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Synergistic epistasis as a solution for human existence
Epistasis is one of those terms in biology which has multiple meanings, to the point that even biologists can get turned around (see this 2008 review, Epistasis — the essential role of gene interactions in the structure and evolution of genetic systems, for a little background). Most generically epistasis is the interaction of genes in…
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Evolution in higher dimensions
Ornithomimosaurian dinosaur & ostrich, image credit Nobu Tamura & James G. Howes The Pith: This post explores evolution at two different scales: the broad philosophical and the close in genetic. Philosophically, is evolution a highly conti…
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More bad mutations = greater fitness
Does the chart above strike you as strange? What it shows is that the mean fitness of a population drops as you increase the rate of deleterious mutation (many more mutations are deleterious than favorable)…but at some point the fitness of the population bounces back, despite (or perhaps because of?) the deleterious mutations! This would…
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Snap, phenotype, genotype and fitness
One of the main criticisms of the population genetic pillar of the modern evolutionary synthesis was that too often it was a game of “beanbag genetics”. In other words population geneticists treated genes as discrete independent individual elements within a static sea. R.A. Fisher and his acolytes believed that the average effect of fluctuations of…