Evolutionary Capacitance May Be Favored by Natural Selection

Abstract

Abstract Evolutionary capacitors phenotypically reveal a stock of cryptic genetic variation in a reversible fashion. The sudden and reversible revelation of a range of variation is fundamentally different from the gradual introduction of variation by mutation. Here I study the invasion dynamics of modifiers of revelation. A modifier with the optimal rate of revelation mopt has a higher probability of invading any other population than of being counterinvaded. mopt varies with the population size N and the rate θ at which environmental change makes revelation adaptive. For small populations less than a minimum cutoff Nmin, all revelation is selected against. Nmin is typically quite small and increases only weakly, with θ−1/2. For large populations with N > 1/θ, mopt is ∼1/N. Selection for the optimum is highly effective and increases in effectiveness with larger N ≫ 1/θ. For intermediate values of N, mopt is typically a little less than θ and is only weakly favored over less frequent revelation. The model is analogous to a two-locus model for the evolution of a mutator allele. It is a fully stochastic model and so is able to show that selection for revelation can be strong enough to overcome random drift.