Carnival of Evolution #54 is now up! We don't have a post in this carnival, since we were so demoralized and outraged by our unjust but crushing defeat in the
Halloween pumpkin-carving contest that we apparently couldn't write any further blog posts last month. But nevertheless, #54 is an awesome carnival, with posts ranging from malaria to slime molds, eusociality to eukaryotes, pleiotropy to pedigrees. A wild ride, as always.
The carnival theme this month is "A Walkabout Mount Improbable", which makes me think of adaptive walks on fitness landscapes. So I'll leave you with this picture, ostensibly of a fitness landscape, and a question: do real fitness landscapes look like this?
Yes, but the question is: which peak are you on?
ReplyDeletePhD students are in a valley, by definition. The question is: which peak do I want to climb? :->
ReplyDeleteDo you think real biological multidimensional fitness landscapes have peaks at all?
ReplyDeleteWell, there must be phenotypes with higher fitness and phenotypes with lower fitness. That much seems certain. And so there must be peaks, or at least ridges.
ReplyDelete