Mitotic recombination counteracts the benefits of genetic segregation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ubiquity of sexual reproduction despite its cost has lead to an extensive body of research on the evolution and maintenance of sexual reproduction. Previous work has suggested that sexual reproduction can substantially speed up the rate of adaptation in diploid populations, because sexual populations are able to produce the fittest homozygous genotype by segregation and mating of heterozygous individuals. In contrast, asexual populations must wait for two rare mutational events, one producing a heterozygous carrier and the second converting a heterozygous to a homozygous carrier, before a beneficial mutation can become fixed. By avoiding this additional waiting time, it was shown that the benefits of segregation could overcome a twofold cost of sex. This previous result ignores mitotic recombination (MR), however. Here, we show that MR significantly hastens the spread of beneficial mutations in asexual populations. Indeed, given empirical data on MR, we find that adaptation in asexual populations proceeds as fast as that in sexual populations, especially when beneficial alleles are partially recessive. We conclude that asexual populations can gain most of the benefit of segregation through MR while avoiding the costs associated with sexual reproduction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".