Mutate. Select. Repeat. Mutate. Select. Repeat. You can't understand evolutionary biology if you don't get the significance of that process. And yet, if you think that's all there is to it, you're way off track. PZ explained this very nicely here last week. Let's focus on one simple point that he made, and look at some recent and significant work on that subject that shows just how misleading some of the common simplifications of evolutionary biology can become.
Here's PZ on simple views of mutation and selection:
Stop thinking of mutations as unitary events that either get swiftly culled, because they're deleterious, or get swiftly hauled into prominence by the uplifting crane of natural selection. Mutations are usually negligible changes that get tossed into the stewpot of the gene pool, where they simmer mostly unnoticed and invisible to selection.
I think this is an extremely important point, both for those seeking to answer creationist propaganda and for anyone else trying to understand the process of evolutionary change. The common picture, painted all too often by commentators of various stripes, depicts a world in which mutations run a harrowing gauntlet of selection that is likely to foolishly discard both the gems and the proto-gems of biological function. Oh sure, the cream eventually rises to the top, but only through the magic of seemingly endless eons and limitless opportunities. I hope that most readers of the Panda's Thumb are annoyed by this crude caricature, but it's the standard tale, and when the narrator only has a paragraph, it's the one we're most likely to hear.
To improve the situation, we might first add the concept of random drift. And that helps a lot. Then we would emphasize the selective neutrality of the vast majority of all mutations, as PZ did. And that helps a lot, too. Let's look at another helpful concept, one from the evo-devo playbook, almost crazy at first glance but remarkably interesting and important.
Suppose that one reason many mutations are selectively near-neutral is because genetic systems are able to tolerate mutations that have the capacity to be strongly deleterious. Suppose, in other words, that organisms are robust enough to live with seriously nasty genetic problems. This would mean that such mutations could escape selection, and that populations could harbor even more genetic diversity than our simplistic account would seem to suggest.
Some very nice work in the fruit fly ("Phenotypic robustness conferred by apparently redundant transcriptional enhancers"), performed by Frankel and colleagues and published in Nature in July, shows us one way this sort of thing can work. The authors were studying genetic control elements (called enhancers) that turn genes on and off. Specifically, they were looking at how the expression of a gene called shavenbaby was affected by a set of enhancers. (The shavenbaby gene controls the development of hair-like structures on the surface of the fly larva - i.e., maggot - and so alterations in the embryo's patterning that result from changes in shavenbaby function are easily detectable by simple microscopy.) Now, like many genes that control development, shavenbaby is regulated by a few different enhancers, some that are close to the gene and others that are apparently redundant and are further away. These latter elements are called "shadow" enhancers, as they are remote and distinct from the primary enhancers but highly similar in activity.
Why all this redundancy? Others had proposed that shadow enhancers might confer "phenotypic robustness" - i.e., developmental or functional robustness - by maintaining function in the face of significant challenges (environmental changes, for example), and Frankel et al. set out to test that hypothesis. First they deleted the shadow enhancer region, and this had a very mild effect, consistent with the idea that the shadow enhancers are redundant with respect to the function of the primary enhancers. But then they examined development in the absence of the shadow enhancers, now introducing environmental stress (extremes of temperature), and found dramatic developmental defects. They concluded that the shavenbaby shadow enhancers normally contribute to phenotypic robustness through what they term "developmental buffering." In other words, the animal's critical developmental pathways are buffered against many disastrous alterations, in part through the action of redundant control systems.
That's interesting all by itself, but the authors went one crucial step further. What if the redundant enhancers can also buffer against genetic disasters? The experiment was straightforward: they deleted one copy of a major developmental control gene (called wingless). Those animals are just fine, until they lose the buffering of the shavenbaby shadow enhancers. Without the redundant system, the loss of one wingless gene leads to a significant change in developmental patterning. The conclusion, I think, is quite interesting: the impact of the shadow enhancers only becomes apparent when the system is stressed, by environmental challenges and even by genetic problems elsewhere in the genome.
Such developmental buffering systems are thought to be common in animal genomes, and this means that animal development is capable of tolerating significant genetic dysfunction. It means, I think, that simplistic stories about deleterious mutants being readily discarded from populations are even less useful than we already should have realized, and that's without the deliberate misuse of such outlines by anti-evolution spinmeisters.
And one last thing. Why my little comment about the evo-devo playbook? Well, one concept championed by evo-devo thinkers is the notion of "evolvability." The idea (roughly) is that the ability to generate diversity is something that we should expect to see in evolution. Like most other evo-devo proposals, it's been savaged by some smart critics. But phenotypic buffering by redundant developmental control elements is just the kind of thing that "evolvability" was meant to encompass when it was discussed by Kirschner and Gerhart more than a decade ago. So I say we give credit where it's due. Anyone else?
31 Comments
Dennis Venema · 3 August 2010
Nice post Steve.
Putting on my geneticist hat, another major factor in evolution that routinely gets overlooked is that sexual reproduction allows for very efficient recombination. Recombination is a huge driver in generating new combinations of alleles, some combinations of which will be more adaptive than others. Variation arising through recombination greatly outstrips that of de novo mutation alone.
JGB · 3 August 2010
I think that it is worth pointing out that part of the ambiguity could easily result from not explicitly distinguishing between mutation as an observable phenotype vs. mutation from strictly a gene point of view. To an organismal biologist neutral mutations are of less utility and they natural emphasis would be to focus more on the short and sweet version because it is the data that they are more familiar in handling.
JGB · 3 August 2010
Mike Elzinga · 3 August 2010
This fits nicely into a more general context in which the size and “richness” of a complex system tends to enhance system stability in the face of fluctuations and perturbations.
Just looking at large systems containing a very large number, N, of particles maintained near some relatively constant energy reveals that the fluctuations about a mean value of some chosen parameter that describes the system are on the order of 1/√N (i.e., the reciprocal of the square root of N).
Simple systems consisting of relatively few parts tend to have large relative fluctuations, and tend to be sensitive to relatively small perturbations that can destroy them.
The enormous sizes and complexities as well as the diversities of large systems usually provide a relatively stable environment or “bath” in which energy driven organization and coordination can take place.
This is a general rule in nature.
Joe Felsenstein · 3 August 2010
I am less sure than Steve M or PZ that most mutations at coding loci are neutral. Just because you can't see their effect in the lab does not mean nature can't. If the population size is (say) 1 million, population-genetic theory says that selection coefficients (fractional differences of fitness) as small as 1 part in 4 million can have an effect different from neutrality.
Another phenomenon to think of is that if developmental buffering reduces the selection coefficient against a mutant (say) fourfold, for a dominant or partially dominant mutation the equilibrium frequency in the population will rise until a new equilibrium is reached, with the mutation four times more frequent. The decrease in fitness caused by recurrent mutations at that locus then ends up being about the same! So the notion that buffering eliminates the deleterious effect of mutation is not correct, in the long run.
German Santanilla · 3 August 2010
This post and PZ's last post, together with the commentary for, are the reason I keep coming back to the Thumb. Clear, concise, intelligent dialogue on a vitally important subject. Keep it up.
JGB · 3 August 2010
Joe isn't there a kinetic effect where smaller and smaller coefficients allow mutations to persist for longer periods of time? Longer persistence would increase the efficacy of other recombination effects at sampling a wider territory.
Joe Felsenstein · 3 August 2010
fnxtr · 3 August 2010
... and then while the shadow enhancers are doing their job the original enhancer can run off and do something else...
Mike E, I'm always entertained in the best possible way by your ability to restate biological reality in the language of physics.
Reed A. Cartwright · 3 August 2010
We had a paper recently accepted that looks at the consequence of recurrent mutations and "moderate" selection coefficients. (I'll explain in better detail when it is published.)
If selection is very weak, then the mutants will act like neutral alleles. If selection is very strong, then the mutant will either be rapidly fixed or rapidly lost. Between these regions, there is a "twilight" area in which selection is strong enough to be non neutral, but not strong enough to be deterministic or rapid.
This ends up allowing selective variants to persist in the population for a long time, producing complex dynamics.
Mike Elzinga · 3 August 2010
fnxtr · 3 August 2010
That's really interesting... there are degrees of neutrality?
Sort of like a shiftless transmission as opposed to a 5-speed.
Mike Elzinga · 3 August 2010
Rolf Aalberg · 4 August 2010
Rich Blinne · 4 August 2010
Rich Blinne · 4 August 2010
Oops. Please replace all instances of shadow regulator with shadow enhancer above. Must. not. post. before. coffee.
Perplexed in Peoria · 4 August 2010
Steve concludes by asking:"But phenotypic buffering by redundant developmental control elements is just the kind of thing that "evolvability" was meant to encompass when it was discussed by Kirschner and Gerhart more than a decade ago. So I say we give credit where it's due. Anyone else?"
Not me, thanks. But I will admit that it is an interesting subject, well worth discussing. For the sake of argument, we will assume that PBbRDC really is the kind of thing that K&G meant by "evolvability". Has PBbRDC arisen by evolution? Yes of course. But is it an adaptation? Has it evolved by natural selection? Aye, there's the rub. If it is, in some sense, an adaptation, but it did not arise by NS, just why did it arise? Concursus?
Before Darwin, people found two kinds of "fitness" or "adaptation" in nature. First, organisms seemed well fitted to their environments, in that the organisms could tolerate and exploit those environments. Second, environments seemed well fitted to their inhabitants; they were tolerable (in fact, almost "fine-tuned") and they provided bountiful exploitable resources. But today, we only worry about the first kind of fitness: fitness to the environment. The second kind, fitness of the environment, is seen as something which doesn't really require explanation. So the environment is usually treated as an exogenous variable in evolutionary theorizing; the evolution (i.e. change over time) of the environment is mostly explained by geochemistry and plate tectonics and such. So, if this evolution leads to an oxygen-rich atmosphere with moderate temperatures suitable to be exploited by animals, and even intelligent animals, we tell ourselves that we "just got lucky".
Similarly, I think that the cited "smart critic", Michael Lynch nicely explains the genetic "environment" (or at least, its surprisingly large size) as a side effect of small population sizes, which may itself be explained as something that large organisms just have to expect.
So, why do we have phenotypes which are buffered by redundant developmental controls? The answer that Lynch would give would involve an expansion of "junk" genome size for non-adaptive reasons, coupled with an exploitation of that genetic-environmental resource by the adaptive, non-junk portion of the genome.
In other words, we "just got lucky". I think he is right, but I can certainly understand why TEs continue to exist.
Perplexed in Peoria · 4 August 2010
Jim Thomerson · 4 August 2010
I have thought of neutral mutations as those which make no difference in phenotypic expression, and thus are invisible to selective processes. Because selection is statistical in nature, and statistics don't work well for small populations, I am beginning to think genetic drift in its various forms can be more important than selection in determining the genetic make up of small populations.
Henry J · 4 August 2010
JGB · 4 August 2010
The cost of extra DNA to a multicellular organism is a pretty small part of it's total energy budget. So on the face of it while an individual may not benefit directly from having buffering capacity his descendants could realize some benefit as the gene pool starts to shuffle things. As long as the only cost was the energy of replicating the extra DNA chunk the benefit would not have to be large to come out ahead.
Another way to envision some of these more complex systems of interacting genes and benefits only in some genetic backgrounds is that they could be modeled as a special kind of frequency dependent selection.
If you consider the normal environmental fluctuations as well I think this is an under appreciated way of generating more polymorphism. The alleles wouldn't be neutral in some senses they would just tend to have slightly different affects, and be best in slightly different conditions. The periodic fluctuations would tend to drive very small changes back and forth in the gene pool preserving the diversity in a dynamic equilibrium.
Dornier Pfeil · 5 August 2010
The impression I got from PZ's It's more than just genes posting was that 'mutate' is the wrong word. It should be Variate. Select. Repeat. Variate. Select. Repeat.
Your posting reinforces that impression. Is 'variate' the better word?
Joe Felsenstein · 5 August 2010
Perplexed in Peoria · 5 August 2010
Mike Elzinga · 5 August 2010
Mike Elzinga · 6 August 2010
By the way, this is also why the “quiet, nutrient-rich pond” is not necessarily a good model for abiogenesis.
Again, the general rule of the emergence of stable systems is that they form in an energy cascade and the “products” then get shuttled into a relatively benign environment, or stabilizing heat bath, and have a chance to relax into “ground states” that are not re-excited or ripped apart by the more energetic environment in which they were originally formed.
I don’t know what this is called in biology, but in physics it is often referred to as “pumping.”
Rich Blinne · 8 August 2010
Mike Elzinga · 9 August 2010
Berend de Boer · 13 August 2010
Steve: In other words, the animal’s critical developmental pathways are buffered against many disastrous alterations, in part through the action of redundant control systems.
The question though: how on earth did these animals end up with such advanced capabilities?
Steve Matheson · 13 August 2010
Henry J · 13 August 2010
At a guess, the ones with less capabilities tended to leave fewer descendants, and the ones with more tended to leave more?