Population genetics of gene function
Abstract
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of an organism, this observation contributes to extend the population-genetical characterisation of biological function. To support this statement a mathematical relation is derived to link the lifetime ratio T1/T2, which parametrizes the different survival ability of two phenotypes, with population variables that quantify the amount of neutral variation underlying a population's phenotypic distribution.
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