Not by natural selection? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 08, 2014, 15:53 (3941 days ago)
edited by unknown, Saturday, February 08, 2014, 16:08

By RNA producing multiple possibilities?:-http://phys.org/news/2014-02-evolutionary-important-success.html-When you think about evolution, 'survival of the fittest' is probably one of the first things that comes into your head. However, new research from Oxford University finds that the 'fittest' may never arrive in the first place and so aren't around to survive. By modelling populations over long timescales, the study showed that the 'fitness' of their traits was not the most important determinant of success. Instead, the most genetically available mutations dominated the changes in traits. The researchers found that the 'fittest' simply did not have time to be found, or to fix in the population over evolutionary timescales.-We explicitly showed how phenotypes with a high local frequency can fix at the expense of locally rare phenotypes, even if the latter have much higher fitness. Taken together, these arguments suggest that the vast majority of possible phenotypes may never be found, and thus never fix, even though they may globally be the most fit: Evolutionary search is deeply non-ergodic. When Hugo de Vries was advocating for the importance of mutations in evolution, he famously said "Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest" [2]. Here we argue that the fittest may never arrive. Instead evolutionary dynamics can be dominated by the "arrival of the frequent".-http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0086635