fitness function

Glenn.Morton@ORYX.COM
Mon 24 Jul 1995 11:09 CT

Bill Hamilton defines the fitness function and explains why an already adapted
organism is more likely to experience deleterious mutations than advantageous
mutations. I might point out that you can see this in the Selection program I
distributed. If you select for a line morphology, say, and run it for 50
selections, the most fit form is likely to be only 10 mutations ago. But if
you run the selection for 10,000 mutations, the most fit form is likely to be
2-3000 mutations ago. As the form becomes "fit" to the selection criteria, it
gets increasingly difficult to find a "more fit" form. By the 10,000th
mutation in the selection program, nearly all mutations are deleterious.

glenn