Ah, so you haven’t heard about this thing. It’s not really lucky 10,000 territory, but it’s still cool.
There are situations, where in sexually reproducing organisms, an unambiguously bad gene can spread through the population, just by ensuring it’s more likely to appear in the next generation. As long as it’s not so bad it kills the species off, you’re still likely to observe it a lot in a future population. We’ve actually harnessed this idea technologically, with genetically modified mosquitoes that crash their local population by skewing all offspring malewards.
That is one example of ‘not detrimental enough to impact reproduction’ which I meant in the context of a population and not an individual, but I guess that my wording wasn’t clear enough.
Ah, so you haven’t heard about this thing. It’s not really lucky 10,000 territory, but it’s still cool.
There are situations, where in sexually reproducing organisms, an unambiguously bad gene can spread through the population, just by ensuring it’s more likely to appear in the next generation. As long as it’s not so bad it kills the species off, you’re still likely to observe it a lot in a future population. We’ve actually harnessed this idea technologically, with genetically modified mosquitoes that crash their local population by skewing all offspring malewards.
Richard Dawkins wrote a pop-sci book about it. Here’s a list of examples on Wikipedia.
That is one example of ‘not detrimental enough to impact reproduction’ which I meant in the context of a population and not an individual, but I guess that my wording wasn’t clear enough.