News: Flexibility trumps fitness in sexual reproduction, says new theory in evolutionary biology
- From: "Robert Karl Stonjek" <rstonjek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 13:43:04 -0500 (EST)
Flexibility trumps fitness in sexual reproduction, says new theory in
evolutionary biology
Berkeley - The utility of sex, according to an intriguing new theory of
evolutionary biology, may be its ability to promote genes that play well
with many other partners rather than those that shine with just one specific
set of genes.
This idea of genetic mixability, described in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences the week of Nov. 24, hits on the difficulty
evolutionary biologists have had in understanding sex, specifically its role
in population genetics and Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest mantra.
"It's the generalist winning over the specialist," said Christos
Papadimitriou, professor of computer sciences at the University of
California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper.
"During the past century, it has often been assumed that sexual reproduction
should somehow facilitate the increase in fitness under natural selection,
leading to the 'best' combinations of genes," said lead author Adi Livnat, a
Miller Institute post-doctoral fellow based at UC Berkeley's Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "But no agreement has been
reached on whether and how this could really work. One might think, for
example, that by bringing together genes from different individuals, sexual
reproduction could create a very successful combination of genes. But just
as sexual reproduction will create that very successful combination of
genes, it could also break it down in the next generation."
That sex can actually impede the increase in the fitness of the population
raises the question of how it can remain the dominant form of reproduction
across all manner of species. Sex - at its core the merging of genes from
different individuals to create genetically unique offspring - is the
reproductive method of choice from humans to plants to many fungi. This form
of reproduction must be doing something right, in terms of evolution.
Veering from the assumption that sexual reproduction increases the average
fitness of a population, the researchers came up with a new measure they
call "mixability" to represent a gene's ability to perform well across many
different combinations. They tested the mixability measure in a number of
scenarios within a well-established population-genetic framework.
They found that if the goal is to maximize fitness by finding a particularly
good combination of genes, asexual reproduction - which increases a
population's numbers at a much faster rate than sexual reproduction - works
very well.
In contrast, sexual reproduction, through the process of recombination and
segregation of chromosomes, strongly favors genes that work well in many
different variations rather than any one good combination. In that view, the
authors wrote, alleles of the same gene compete with each other based upon
how well they perform on average rather than how well they perform in any
one specific combination.
"It's important to note that during the process of evolution, the mixability
value increases, though it doesn't increase all the time," said the paper's
co-author Marcus Feldman, professor of biology at Stanford University and a
world-renowned theorist in evolutionary biology. "The approach we take is
different from usual because we're interested in evolutionary transience,
and in the long run, our mixability value may actually decrease because too
much variability is lost from the population."
Even so, sexual reproduction has a great advantage for mixability compared
with asexual reproduction, according to the models in the paper.
In what may appear at first to be an unconventional comparison, sexual
reproduction has something in common with the rebalancing of a stock
portfolio at regular intervals, explained Livnat.
"If every year some money is taken out from stocks that have performed well
and reallocated to stocks that lost money, the growth rate of the portfolio
is averaged out over time," he said. "Analogously, sexual reproduction
entails moving genes from one combination to another in a manner that, over
the course of multiple generations, can tie the success of a gene to its
average performance across genotypes rather than its maximum performance."
Livnat started thinking about this problem in discussions with
Papadimitriou, a leading computer theorist whose research includes
optimization algorithms. Such programs are widely used to find best outcomes
in applications such as computer networks, transportation planning and
financial models.
The researchers explained that of the two main techniques for optimization
programming, one, known as simulated annealing, solves problems using a
process analogous to asexual reproduction, while the other, known as genetic
algorithms, is inspired by sexual reproduction. Genetic algorithms should
theoretically be the better of the two techniques at finding the best
solutions for a problem because they mimic an approach that is so dominant
in nature. However, as it turns out, genetic algorithms often perform no
better than simulated annealing.
"We were trying to figure out why an algorithm that mimics a good idea in
nature was not coming up with better results," said Papadimitriou. "It
dawned on us that what sexual reproduction is doing is not maximizing
fitness, but doing something more subtle. It is bringing about genetic
variants that perform well across many possibilities in connection with a
great variety of genetic partners. If a particular gene variant can do well
with many other alleles, not just a highly specialized variant, evolution is
advanced."
The researchers noted that when the human genome was sequenced in 2003,
there was some surprise that humans did not possess far more genes than
other species. It turns out that how those genes are combined may be a
critical factor in distinguishing humans from other species, supporting the
importance of flexibility over fitness.
Feldman, who has studied the evolution of sex and recombination for more
than three decades, said he expects this new theory to trigger much debate
among his peers. "This problem of understanding sex will go on being one of
the central issues in evolution," he said.
Source: University of California - Berkeley
http://www.physorg.com/news146767434.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek
.
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