Re: Article: Bacteria may have endless diversity


"Robert Karl Stonjek" <rstonjek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dhfuev$1mmo$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> The minimum number of gene alleles required for a species such as humans to
> survive is far more than can be carried in the genome of any one
> individual

I suspect that you are suggesting this as a hypothesis, rather than
stating it as a fact.

> - think of hair colour and eye colour, though probably not
> survival related (sexual selection?) as an easily identifiable example.

A better example might be the A-B-O system of blood types.

I agree that in sexual species, the viability of a lineage may well be
dependent on the existence of alleles available in the population or
species as a whole, but not all available in any one individual.

But I have my doubts about your words 'far more'. One of the spinoffs
of the early Haldane's dilemma debate (and also the Hubby and Lewontin
paper) was the realization that the amount of balanced polymorphism that
can be maintained by selection is fairly limited.

Even Hamilton's PRQ theory doesn't require that there be a lot of loci
with polymorphisms. Even with just 20 loci with just two alleles per
locus, recombination can generate over a million different phenotypes
in a haploid model.


.

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