Evolution of Genetic Redundancy : The Relevance of Complexity in Genotype-Phenotype Mapping

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the complexity of genotype-phenotype mappings influences the evolution of genetic redundancy, showing that higher complexity can promote redundancy evolution.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical model demonstrating that complex GPM structures enable the evolution of genetic redundancy, challenging previous assumptions.

Findings

Genetic redundancy can evolve with complex GPM.

Analytical expression for fitness dependence on redundancy.

Complexity in GPM promotes redundancy evolution.

Abstract

Genetic redundancy is ubiquitous and can be found in any organism. However, it has been argued that genetic redundancy reduces total population fitness, and therefore, redundancy is unlikely to evolve. In this letter, we study an evolutionary model with high-dimensional genotype-phenotype mapping (GPM) to investigate the relevance of complexity in GPM to the evolution of genetic redundancy. By applying the replica method to deal with quenched randomness, the redundancy dependence of the fitness is analytically obtained, which demonstrates that genetic redundancy can indeed evolve, provided that the GPM is complex. Our result provides a novel insight into how genetic redundancy evolves.