My impression is that the effects of genes which vary between individuals are essentially independent, and small effects are almost always locally linear. With the amount of measurement noise and number of variables, I just don’t think we could pick out nonlinearities or interaction effects of any plausible strength if we tried!
This seems probably false? The search term is Epistasis. Its not that well researched, because of the reasons you mentioned. In my brief search, it seems to play a role in some immunodeficiency disorders, but I’d guess also more things which don’t seem clearly linked to genes yet.
I don’t understand why you’d expect only linear genes to vary in a species. Is this just because most species have relatively little genetic variation, so such variation is by nature linear? This feels like a bastardization of the concept to me, but maybe not.
Edit: Perhaps you can also make the claim that linear variation allows for more accurate estimation of the goodness or badness of gene combos via recombination. So we should expect the more successful species to have more linear variation.
My impression is that the effects of genes which vary between individuals are essentially independent, and small effects are almost always locally linear. With the amount of measurement noise and number of variables, I just don’t think we could pick out nonlinearities or interaction effects of any plausible strength if we tried!
This seems probably false? The search term is Epistasis. Its not that well researched, because of the reasons you mentioned. In my brief search, it seems to play a role in some immunodeficiency disorders, but I’d guess also more things which don’t seem clearly linked to genes yet.
I don’t understand why you’d expect only linear genes to vary in a species. Is this just because most species have relatively little genetic variation, so such variation is by nature linear? This feels like a bastardization of the concept to me, but maybe not.
Edit: Perhaps you can also make the claim that linear variation allows for more accurate estimation of the goodness or badness of gene combos via recombination. So we should expect the more successful species to have more linear variation.