Bias in the arrival of variation can dominate over natural selection in Richard Dawkins's biomorphs.

Autor: Martin NS; Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom., Camargo CQ; Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.; College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom., Louis AA; Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PLoS computational biology [PLoS Comput Biol] 2024 Mar 27; Vol. 20 (3), pp. e1011893. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Mar 27 (Print Publication: 2024).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011893
Abstrakt: Biomorphs, Richard Dawkins's iconic model of morphological evolution, are traditionally used to demonstrate the power of natural selection to generate biological order from random mutations. Here we show that biomorphs can also be used to illustrate how developmental bias shapes adaptive evolutionary outcomes. In particular, we find that biomorphs exhibit phenotype bias, a type of developmental bias where certain phenotypes can be many orders of magnitude more likely than others to appear through random mutations. Moreover, this bias exhibits a strong preference for simpler phenotypes with low descriptional complexity. Such bias towards simplicity is formalised by an information-theoretic principle that can be intuitively understood from a picture of evolution randomly searching in the space of algorithms. By using population genetics simulations, we demonstrate how moderately adaptive phenotypic variation that appears more frequently upon random mutations can fix at the expense of more highly adaptive biomorph phenotypes that are less frequent. This result, as well as many other patterns found in the structure of variation for the biomorphs, such as high mutational robustness and a positive correlation between phenotype evolvability and robustness, closely resemble findings in molecular genotype-phenotype maps. Many of these patterns can be explained with an analytic model based on constrained and unconstrained sections of the genome. We postulate that the phenotype bias towards simplicity and other patterns biomorphs share with molecular genotype-phenotype maps may hold more widely for developmental systems.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Martin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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