ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2004
Evolvability is a selectable trait.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2004. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 78 papers.
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Who cites it
78 citing papers in PubMed.
- An empirical long-term competition among natural yeast isolates reveals that short-term fitness largely but not entirely predicts long-term outcomes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Structural diversity and evolutionary constraints of oxidative phosphorylation.Cell genomics · 2025Article
- A general and biomedical perspective of viral quasispecies.RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Review
- Pathogen contingency loci and the evolution of host specificity: Simple sequence repeats mediate Bartonella adaptation to a wild rodent host.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- Open-endedness in synthetic biology: A route to continual innovation for biological design.Science advances · 2024Review
- The divergence of mutation rates and spectra across the Tree of Life.EMBO reports · 2023Review
- The contribution of evolvability to the eco-evolutionary dynamics of competing species.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Sexual selection for males with beneficial mutations.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Mutation Rates, Mutation Frequencies, and Proofreading-Repair Activities in RNA Virus Genetics.Viruses · 2021Review
- Convergent Evolution, Evolving Evolvability, and the Origins of Lethal Cancer.Molecular cancer research : MCR · 2020Review
- Evolving generalists in switching rugged landscapes.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Penicillin Trunk Injection Affects Bacterial Community Structure in Citrus Trees.Microbial ecology · 2019Article
- Quasispecies and virus.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2018Review
- Control of finite critical behaviour in a small-scale social system.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Genetic drift, selection and the evolution of the mutation rate.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2016Review
- Evolutionary Connectionism: Algorithmic Principles Underlying the Evolution of Biological Organisation in Evo-Devo, Evo-Eco and Evolutionary Transitions.Evolutionary biology · 2016Article
- Evolvability of an Optimal Recombination Rate.Genome biology and evolution · 2015Article
- Migration and horizontal gene transfer divide microbial genomes into multiple niches.Nature communications · 2015Article
- Something Old, Something New: Conserved Enzymes and the Evolution of Novelty in Plant Specialized Metabolism.Plant physiology · 2015Review
- Primordial germ cells: the first cell lineage or the last cells standing?Development (Cambridge, England) · 2015Review
18 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, because of the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object of Darwinian selection, emphasizing the collective nature of the process. We quantify our theory with computer simulations of protein evolution. These simulations demonstrate that rapid or dramatic environmental change leads to selection for greater evolvability. The selective pressure for large-scale genetic moves such as DNA exchange becomes increasingly strong as the environmental conditions become more uncertain. Our results demonstrate that evolvability is a selectable trait and allow for the explanation of a large body of experimental results.
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