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Contingency, convergence and hyper-astronomical numbers in biological evolution.

Ard A Louis1

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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Evolutionary outcomes appear contingent due to vast genetic spaces. However, biased variation in how genetic information maps to traits explains evolutionary convergence, showing randomness differs between genetic and phenotype spaces.

Keywords:
Arrival of variationBias in evolutionExtended evolutionary synthesisGenotype–phenotype maps

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Area of Science:

  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Genetics
  • Developmental Biology

Background:

  • The vastness of genetic possibility spaces suggests evolutionary outcomes are highly contingent.
  • Evolutionary convergence, the independent evolution of similar traits, appears to contradict this contingency.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relationship between genotype and phenotype to explain evolutionary convergence.
  • To explore how biases in variation affect evolutionary trajectories.

Main Methods:

  • Studied simple genotype-phenotype maps.
  • Enumerated counterfactual spaces of all possible phenotypes.

Main Results:

  • Strong biases in the arrival of variation can explain why certain phenotypes repeatedly appear in nature.
  • Biased variation offers a non-selective explanation for specific types of evolutionary convergence.

Conclusions:

  • The mapping of genotypes to phenotypes is crucial for understanding evolutionary convergence.
  • Randomness and contingency play different roles in genetic versus phenotype spaces.