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Politics : Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy of Death, Disease, Depravit
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To: Brumar89 who wrote (164)10/16/2015 3:44:59 PM
From: TigerPaw  Read Replies (1) of 1308
 
but it would never spread
As my mother used to say "Never is a long time".

There are several ways that a change could become widespread even if the change had no current advantage.

The change could be expressed in an individual who also has exceptional traits that are unrelated to the change. The new gene would be along for the ride. Genes don't survive by themselves, they survive when the whole organism and all the genes it contains survive.

There is also a phenomina known as the "founders effect". This is where an individual happens into a niche that is currently underpopulated (an island for example, or a fish in a cave). In small populations there is a lot more incest and that makes the individual more likely to be mated with another organism that also has that gene. Haemophilia is a famous example of a harmful gene becoming widespread via close family breeding.

Another gene spreading event that also relies on reduced competition is the "survivor's effect". It happens when most of an individuals competition is wiped out in some tragedy or ecological disaster. A subset of this is the "Gengis Khan" effect where males were wiped out but many females remained.

All of these distortions in the equilibrium lead to punctuated differential survival rates, and any gene in the surviving organism benefits. They were lucky.
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