Standing variation of beneficial mutations is sufficient for maintenance of anisogamy Open Access
Holmes, Caroline (2017)
Abstract
While the advantages of sexual reproduction for genetic
recombination have been studied extensively, the question of
emergence and maintenance of asymmetric sexual reproduction
(anisogamy) has received much less attention. In the anisogamous
case, females are limited in the maximum number of offspring that
they can produce, so that the difference in number of offspring for
a very fit or moderately fit female is minimal. In contrast, males
are far less limited, and a single very fit male can have an
enormous number of offspring. We propose that this asymmetry, and
specifically the amount by which female fitness is curtailed by the
maximum number of offspring she can produce, is what gives rise to
evolutionary stability of anisogamy. We show that the variance in
fitness for the males (which is related to how much the variance
for females is limited) predicts the probability of success of an
anisogamous population in competition with an isogamous one. This
effect alone is sufficient to explain prevalence of anisogamy in
rapidly changing environments, where mutations that had spread
through the population as neutral mutations can quickly become
beneficial. We end with proposals for experimental verifications of
our theory.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction - pg. 1
2. The Model - pg. 3
2.1 Simulation Details - pg. 4
3. Results - pg. 4
Figure 1 - pg. 6
Figure 2 - pg. 7
Figure 3 - pg. 8
4. Discussion - pg. 5
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