Back

Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

Gerrish, P. J.; Galeota-Sprung, B.; Cordero, F.; Sniegowski, P. D.; Colato, A.; Hengartner, N. W.; Vejalla, V.; Chevalier, J.; Ycart, B.

2020-09-30 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2020.08.28.271486 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The ubiquity of sex and recombination in nature is widely viewed as enigmatic, despite an abundance of limited-scope explanations. Natural selection, it seems, should amplify well-matched combinations of genes. Recombination would break up these well-matched combinations and should thus be suppressed. We show, to the contrary, that on average: 1) natural selection amplifies poorly-matched gene combinations and 2) creates time-averaged negative associations in the process. Recombination breaks up these poorly-matched combinations, neutralizes the negative associations, and should thus be passively and universally favored.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.