Re: The Cost of Substitution [possible REPOST]


"Guy A Hoelzer" <hoelzer@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:emangj$167u$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
... I am just trying to make more concrete the claims being made in
the debate about a cost imposed by the fixation of alleles in populations.
Are you saying the cost comes in the form of immediate offspring? In other
words, when a fixation happens individuals are somehow compelled to produce
more offspring as a sort of compensation?

I don't expect that this is what you are saying, but I am continuing to push
for somebody to step up and tell me what this supposed cost is. The more
responses I get without defining a material cost (the price of fixation),
the less inclined I am to think that there is anything more than hot air in
the claim.

Hot air in what claim? The claim I am making (and I think the claim of
ReMine and Haldane as well) is that there is an upper limit on the rate
at which natural selection can fix advantageous alleles in a population.
The claim says nothing about 'cost' directly.

However, in explication of this claim about a speed limit, it is convenient
to define a quantity - traditionally, but misleadingly called a 'cost' -
which the population can pay out only so fast, but which is proportional
to progress in fixing alleles. There is nothing 'costly' about this cost,
and it would probably eliminate a lot of confusion if it were called a
'load' instead.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Cost of Substitution [possible REPOST]
    ... the debate about a cost imposed by the fixation of alleles in populations. ... BTW, as the basic argument about the "speed limit" becomes more clear to me, ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: The Cost of Substitution [possible REPOST]
    ... variance in reproductive success among individuals prior to ... It could be driven rapidly to fixation by ... there is no cost at all to the ... Rapid fixation of alleles via natural selection requires ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: The Cost of Substitution [possible REPOST]
    ... the debate about a cost imposed by the fixation of alleles in populations. ... We expect advantageous mutations to increase in frequency ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: The Cost of Substitution [possible REPOST]
    ... variance in reproductive success among individuals prior to ... It could be driven rapidly to fixation by ... there is no cost at all to the ... Rapid fixation of alleles via natural selection requires ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: The Cost of Substitution [possible REPOST]
    ... the debate about a cost imposed by the fixation of alleles in populations. ... would you say that the same "speed limit" also applies to drift? ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)
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