Cochran had a post saying if you take a bunch of different genomes and make a new one by choosing the majority allele at each locus, you might end up creating a person smarter/healthier/etc than anyone who ever lived, because most of the bad alleles would be gone. But to me it seems a bit weird, because if the algorithm is so simple and the benefit is so huge, why hasn’t nature found it?
Mildly deleterious mutations take a long time to get selected out, so you end up with an equilibrium where a small fraction of organisms have them. Genetic load is a relevant concept.
Hmm, two individuals of a species mating obviously couldn’t compare their genomes with other representatives of the species and take the modal allele. But many species, especially plants, do carry more than two copies of each chromosome (e.g. black mulberry apparently has 44 copies of each gene). How difficult would it be to evolve a process that compared the alleles on each chromosome that the individual carried and picked the modal one for producing gametes?
Intuitively it feels to me like it’d be hard for biology to do/evolve and that it’d require something more like a computer, but I haven’t studied biology much so I don’t expect my intuition to be very predictive. That Wikipedia article for polyploidy also didn’t mention any research to have found polyploidy to have such a function.
Yeah, it would have to be at least 3 individuals mating. And there would be some weird dynamics: the individual that feels less fit than the partners would have a weaker incentive to mate, because its genes would be less likely to continue. Then the other partners would have to offer some bribe, maybe take on more parental investment. Then maybe some individuals would pretend to be less fit, to receive the bribe. It’s tricky to think about, maybe it’s already researched somewhere?
Cochran had a post saying if you take a bunch of different genomes and make a new one by choosing the majority allele at each locus, you might end up creating a person smarter/healthier/etc than anyone who ever lived, because most of the bad alleles would be gone. But to me it seems a bit weird, because if the algorithm is so simple and the benefit is so huge, why hasn’t nature found it?
How is nature supposed to gather statistical data about the population to determine what the majority allele is?
Mildly deleterious mutations take a long time to get selected out, so you end up with an equilibrium where a small fraction of organisms have them. Genetic load is a relevant concept.
Hmm, two individuals of a species mating obviously couldn’t compare their genomes with other representatives of the species and take the modal allele. But many species, especially plants, do carry more than two copies of each chromosome (e.g. black mulberry apparently has 44 copies of each gene). How difficult would it be to evolve a process that compared the alleles on each chromosome that the individual carried and picked the modal one for producing gametes?
Intuitively it feels to me like it’d be hard for biology to do/evolve and that it’d require something more like a computer, but I haven’t studied biology much so I don’t expect my intuition to be very predictive. That Wikipedia article for polyploidy also didn’t mention any research to have found polyploidy to have such a function.
Naively extrapolating, such an allele couldn’t spread, because before it’s very common, it would delete itself!
Yeah, it would have to be at least 3 individuals mating. And there would be some weird dynamics: the individual that feels less fit than the partners would have a weaker incentive to mate, because its genes would be less likely to continue. Then the other partners would have to offer some bribe, maybe take on more parental investment. Then maybe some individuals would pretend to be less fit, to receive the bribe. It’s tricky to think about, maybe it’s already researched somewhere?