Fitness (often denoted
Contents
- Fitness is a propensity
- Models of fitness asexuals
- Absolute fitness
- Relative fitness
- Change in genotype frequencies due to selection
- History
- Genetic load
- References
With asexual reproduction, it is sufficient to assign fitnesses to genotypes. With sexual reproduction, genotypes are scrambled every generation. In this case, fitness values can be assigned to alleles by averaging over possible genetic backgrounds. Natural selection tends to make alleles with higher fitness more common over time, resulting in Darwinian evolution.
The term "Darwinian fitness" can be used to make clear the distinction with physical fitness. Fitness does not include a measure of survival or life-span; Herbert Spencer's well-known phrase "survival of the fittest" should be interpreted as: "Survival of the form (phenotypic or genotypic) that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations."
Inclusive fitness differs from individual fitness by including the ability of an allele in one individual to promote the survival and/or reproduction of other individuals that share that allele, in preference to individuals with a different allele. One mechanism of inclusive fitness is kin selection.
Fitness is a propensity
Fitness is often defined as a propensity or probability, rather than the actual number of offspring. For example, according to Maynard Smith, "Fitness is a property, not of an individual, but of a class of individuals — for example homozygous for allele A at a particular locus. Thus the phrase ’expected number of offspring’ means the average number, not the number produced by some one individual. If the first human infant with a gene for levitation were struck by lightning in its pram, this would not prove the new genotype to have low fitness, but only that the particular child was unlucky."
Equivalently, "the fitness of the individual - having an array x of phenotypes — is the probability, s(x), that the individual will be included among the group selected as parents of the next generation."
Models of fitness: asexuals
To avoid the complications of sex and recombination, we initially restrict our attention to an asexual population without genetic recombination. Then fitnesses can be assigned directly to genotypes rather than having to worry about individual alleles. There are two commonly used measures of fitness; absolute fitness and relative fitness.
Absolute fitness
The absolute fitness (
An absolute fitness larger than 1 indicates growth in that genotype's abundance; an absolute fitness smaller than 1 indicates decline.
Relative fitness
Whereas absolute fitness determines changes in genotype abundance, relative fitness (
where
Absolute fitnesses can be used to calculate relative fitness, since
Change in genotype frequencies due to selection
The change in genotype frequencies due to selection follows immediately from the definition of relative fitness,
Thus, a genotype's frequency will decline or increase depending on whether its fitness is lower or greater than the mean fitness, respectively.
In the particular case that there are only two genotypes of interest (e.g. representing the invasion of a new mutant allele), the change in genotype frequencies is often written in a different form. Suppose that two genotypes
Thus, the change in genotype
where the last approximation hold for
History
The British sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" in his 1864 work Principles of Biology to characterise what Charles Darwin had called natural selection.
The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane was the first to quantify fitness, in terms of the modern evolutionary synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelian genetics starting with his 1924 paper A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection. The next further advance was the introduction of the concept of inclusive fitness by the British biologist W.D. Hamilton in 1964 in his paper on The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour.
Genetic load
Genetic load measures the average fitness of a population of individuals, relative either to a theoretical genotype of optimal fitness, or relative to the most fit genotype actually present in the population. Consider n genotypes
Genetic load may increase when deleterious mutations, migration, inbreeding, or outcrossing lower mean fitness. Genetic load may also increase when beneficial mutations increase the maximum fitness against which other mutations are compared; this is known as the substitutional load or cost of selection.