ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2010
The rate of establishment of complex adaptations.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Mutation pressure, drift, and the pace of molecular coevolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A fitness trade-off explains the early fate of yeast aneuploids with chromosome gains.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Evolution in the weak-mutation limit: Stasis periods punctuated by fast transitions between saddle points on the fitness landscape.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- On the feasibility of saltational evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Inactivation of a Mismatch-Repair System Diversifies Genotypic Landscape ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2019Article
- The soft explosive model of placental mammal evolution.BMC evolutionary biology · 2018Article
- Protein evolution depends on multiple distinct population size parameters.BMC evolutionary biology · 2018Review
- Evolution of complex adaptations in molecular systems.Nature ecology & evolution · 2017Article
- Population Heterogeneity in Mutation Rate Increases the Frequency of Higher-Order Mutants and Reduces Long-Term Mutational Load.Molecular biology and evolution · 2017Article
- Adaptive evolution of complex innovations through stepwise metabolic niche expansion.Nature communications · 2016Article
- Emergent adaptive behaviour of GRN-controlled simulated robots in a changing environment.PeerJ · 2016Article
- The waiting time problem in a model hominin population.Theoretical biology & medical modelling · 2015Article
- Repeatability of evolution on epistatic landscapes.Scientific reports · 2015Article
- Evolutionary cell biology: two origins, one objective.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
- Reductive genome evolution at both ends of the bacterial population size spectrum.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2014Article
- The relative ages of eukaryotes and akaryotes.Journal of molecular evolution · 2014Article
- The dawn of evolutionary genome engineering.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2014Review
- Epigenetic resolution of the 'curse of complexity' in adaptive evolution of complex traits.The Journal of physiology · 2014Article
- Two new fern chloroplasts and decelerated evolution linked to the long generation time in tree ferns.Genome biology and evolution · 2014Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
A central problem in evolutionary theory concerns the mechanisms by which adaptations requiring multiple mutations emerge in natural populations. We develop a series of expressions that clarify the scaling of the time to establishment of complex adaptations with population size, mutation rate, magnitude of the selective disadvantage of intermediate-state alleles, and the complexity of the adaptation. In general, even in the face of deleterious intermediate steps, the time to establishment is minimized in populations with very large size. Under a broad range of conditions, the time to establishment also scales by no more than the square of the mutation rate, regardless of the number of sites contributing to the adaptive change, demonstrating that the emergence of complex adaptations is only weakly constrained by the independent acquisition of mutations at the underlying sites. Mutator alleles with deleterious side effects have only moderate effects on the rate of adaptation in large populations but can cause a quantum decrease in the time to establishment of some adaptive alleles in small populations, although probably not at a high enough rate to offset the increased deleterious mutation load. Transient hypermutability, whereby a subset of gamete-producing cells mutate at an elevated rate in a nonheritable manner, may also elevate the rate of adaptation, although the effect is modest and appears to result from a simple increase in the rate of transitions between intermediate states rather than from the saltational production of doublet mutations. Taken together, these results illustrate the plausibility of the relatively rapid emergence of specific complex adaptations by conventional population genetic mechanisms and provide insight into the relative incidences of various paths of allelic adaptation in organisms with different population genetic features.
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