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Let me try to be more clear: I make two opposite hypotheses: two alleles versus many alleles. The two alleles hypothesis would imply little variability among fa
by corecoder 10y ago
Let me try to be more clear: I make two opposite hypotheses: two alleles versus many alleles. The two alleles hypothesis would imply little variability among families, many alleles would imply much variability inside families. Where is my logical error?
- smallnamespace 10y agoAssortative mating: it would tend to reduce variability within families, while preserving inter-family variability.
- nostrademons 10y agoMany alleles does not imply more variability if there's a chance of some of those alleles cancelling out. Think about it in terms of coin flips. One coin flip is random: you get heads or tails with 50% probability. A small number of coin flips can lead to large swings. However, many coin flips reliably produces a Gaussian, with only small statistical fluctuations. Now imagine that you decree that for the first ten coin flips, if the result comes up tails you'll ignore it. With many flips, you will still get a (somewhat smaller) Gaussian, but with the mean # of heads shifted over by 5. This is what natural selection & assortative mating does: it doesn't prevent the millions of coin flips from happening, but it eliminates some number of "known bad" outcomes, which will shift the mean over by some amount even as variability remains roughly constant.