[ExI] It's not only the fittest who survive.

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 04:58:32PM +0100, BillK wrote:
> Research shows not only the fittest survive
> 
> Darwin's notion that only the fittest survive has been called into
> question by new research published today (27 March 2011) in Nature.
> 
> <http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/uoe-rsn032311.php>
> 
> Professor Laurence Hurst, of the University of Bath, said: "Key to the
> new understanding is the realisation that the amount of energy
> organisms squeeze out of their food depends on how much food they
> have. Give them abundant food and they use it inefficiently. When we
> combine this with the notion that organisms with different
> food-utilising strategies are also affected in different ways by
> genetic mutations, then we discover a new principle, one in which both
> the fit and the unfit coexist indefinitely."
> 
> Dr Ivana Gudelj, also from the University of Exeter, said: "The fit
> use food well but they aren't resilient to mutations, whereas the less
> efficient, unfit consumers are maintained by their resilience to
> mutation. If there's a low mutation rate, survival of the fittest
> rules, but if not, lots of diversity can be maintained.
> --------------------
> 
> 
> So there's hope for us unfit ones..........      ;)

Not having read the article, evolvability is part of fitness.
Any definition involving fitness is empirically grounded in
allele frequency measurements in the wild.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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