Re:New Model of Evolution Reveals How Cooperation Evolves
by ouid on Thursday June 22, 2017 @07:14PM
(#14616008)
I'm not sure what you think selection is. Organisms which do not have diverse offspring are very unlikely to maintain a lineage through big changes to the environment. Big changes to the environment are frequent. Therefore diversity of offspring, as a trait, is selected for.
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Re:New Model of Evolution Reveals How Cooperation Evolves
by jballanc on Friday June 23, 2017 @02:39AM
(#14617391)
Unless big changes to the environment happen at least once every generation, then there is no way that diversity of offspring will be selected for. Say you have a population of 100,000 organisms and 1 randomly mutates to produce more diverse offspring. That gives the gene a 0.001% occurrence in the population. Hardy-Weinberg principle says that gene will remain at about that percent of the population unless it is selected for. So if a generation passes without selection for that trait, there is a very high probability that gene's occurrence drops back to 0%.
In other words, without a constant source of selection, there is no way for a trait to become fixed in a population.