Adaptive landscapes, genetic distance and the evolution of….pdf

Genet. Res., Camb. (1987), 49, pp. 157-173 With 2 text-figures Printed in Great Britain 15 7 Adaptive landscapes, genetic distance and the evolution of quantitative characters N . H. BARTON Department of Genetics and Biometry, University College, 4 Slephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, U.K. MICHAEL TURELLI Department of Genetics, University of California, Davis, California 95616, U.S.A. (Received 6 August 1986 and in revised form 21 November 1986) Summary The maintenance of polygenic variability by a balance between mutation and stabilizing selection has been analysed using two approximations : the Gaussian and the house of cards . These lead to qualitatively different relationships between the equilibrium genetic variance and the parameters describing selection and mutation. Here we generalize these approximations to describe the dynamics of genetic means and variances under arbitrary patterns of selection and mutation. We incorporate genetic drift into the same mathematical framework. The effects of frequency-independent selection and genetic drift can be determined from the gradient of log mean fitness and a covariance matrix that depends on genotype frequencies. These equations describe an adaptive landscape, with a natural metric of genetic distance set by the covariance matrix. From this representation we can change coordinates to derive equations describing the dynamics of an additive polygenic character in terms of the moments (means, variances, ...) of allelic effects at individual loci. Only under certain simplifying conditions, such as those derived from the Gaussian and house-of-cards approximations, do these general recursions lead to tractable equations for the first few phenotypic moments. The alternative approximations differ in the constraints they impose on the distributions of allelic effects at individual loci. The Gaussian-based pred