Natural selection and the advantage of recombination

Philip Gerrish (1, 2, 3) , Benjamin Galeota-Sprung (4) , Fernando Cordero (5) , Paul Sniegowski (4) , Alexandre Colato (6) , Nicholas Hengartner (2) , Varun Vejalla (7) , Julien Chevallier (8) , Bernard Ycart (8)

1 The University of New Mexico [Albuquerque]
2 LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory
3 Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez
4 University of Pennsylvania - Department of Biology
5 Technische Fakultät, Universität Bielefeld
6 UFSCar - Universidade Federal de São Carlos [São Carlos]
7 Thomas Jefferson High school for Science and Technology
8 SVH - Statistique pour le Vivant et l’Homme

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 natural selection amplifies poorly-matched gene combinations and creates negative associations in the process. Recombination breaks up these poorly-matched combinations, neutralizes the negative associations, and should thus be passively and universally favored.

Domaines: Probabilités [math.PR]

Philip Gerrish, Benjamin Galeota-Sprung, Fernando Cordero, Paul Sniegowski, Alexandre Colato, et al.. Natural selection and the advantage of recombination. 2021. ⟨hal-03352202⟩