Recombination and peak jumping

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that recombination can significantly enhance adaptation in complex fitness landscapes with multiple peaks, especially where classical models fail to capture such effects.

Contribution

It reveals the advantage of recombination in complex landscapes with gene interactions, highlighting effects absent in simple or smooth models.

Findings

Recombination provides a significant advantage in complex fitness landscapes.

Shutting off recombination can prevent adaptation in certain scenarios.

The effect of recombination can be extreme, influencing evolutionary outcomes dramatically.

Abstract

We find an advantage of recombination for a category of complex fitness landscapes. Recent studies of empirical fitness landscapes reveal complex gene interactions and multiple peaks, and recombination can be a powerful mechanism for escaping suboptimal peaks. However classical work on recombination largely ignores the effect of complex gene interactions. The advantage we find has no correspondence for 2-locus systems or for smooth landscapes. The effect is sometimes extreme, in the sense that shutting off recombination could result in that the organism fails to adapt. A standard question about recombination is if the mechanism tends to accelerate or decelerate adaptation. However, we argue that extreme effects may be more important than how the majority falls.