RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Natural selection promotes the evolution of recombination 1: among selected genotypes
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.06.07.447320
DO 10.1101/2021.06.07.447320
A1 Philip J Gerrish
A1 Benjamin Galeota-Sprung
A1 Paul Sniegowski
A1 Julien Chevallier
A1 Bernard Ycart
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/07/2021.06.07.447320.abstract
AB Shuffling one’s genetic material with another individual seems a risky endeavor more likely to decrease than to increase offspring fitness. This intuitive argument is commonly employed to explain why the ubiquity of sex and recombination in nature is enigmatic. It is predicated on the notion that natural selection assembles selectively well-matched combinations of genes that recombination would break up resulting in low-fitness offspring – a notion so intuitive that it is often stated in the literature as a self-evident premise. We show, however, that this common premise is only self evident on the surface and that, upon closer examination, it is fundamentally flawed: we find that natural selection in fact has an encompassing tendency to assemble selectively mismatched combinations of alleles; recombination breaks up these selectively mismatched combinations (on average), assembles selectively matched combinations, and should thus be favored. The new perspective our findings offer suggests that sex and recombination are not so enigmatic but are instead natural and unavoidable byproducts of natural selection.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.