{"id":73890,"date":"2012-09-12T23:23:16","date_gmt":"2012-09-13T07:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=18306"},"modified":"2012-09-12T23:23:16","modified_gmt":"2012-09-13T07:23:16","slug":"an-ontology-of-genetic-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/09\/12\/an-ontology-of-genetic-diversity\/","title":{"rendered":"An ontology of genetic diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Implicit in the title <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0451529065\/geneexpressio-20\">The Origin Of Species<\/a> is the question: <strong>why the plural?<\/strong> In other words, why isn&#8217;t there a singular apex species which dominates this planet? One can imagine an abstract system where natural selection slowly but gradually sifts through variation and designs a best-of-all-replicators. And yet on the contrary it seems that our planet has exhibited an overall tendency of going from lower to higher diversity. The age of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stromatolite\">stromatolites<\/a> may be the last epoch when we had the best-of-all-replicators.<\/p>\n<p>\nThese sorts of deep questions about variation drive many of the research projects in evolutionary biology. Often one focuses on a narrow zone of interest. An organism for example which might serve as an illustrative model for more general processes. Or, a particular dynamic which interlocks with other processes to form a whole phenomenon. But on occasion you have to sit and ponder the whole shebang. Why genetic diversity? More specifically, <strong>why not more diversity of genetic diversity?<\/strong> The issue here is what is sometimes termed <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=su1PHT8tHNoC&amp;lpg=PA77&amp;ots=pfHWiSl1dQ&amp;dq=lewontin's%20paradox&amp;pg=PA77#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\">Lewontin&#8217;s paradox<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Consider two populations. One population goes through an extreme bottleneck, while the other maintains a large population over the generations. What would you presume in regards to &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/96FxPRHlWcs\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Implicit in the title The Origin Of Species is the question: why the plural? In other words, why isn&#8217;t there a singular apex species which dominates this planet? One can imagine an abstract system where natural selection slowly but gradually sift&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-evolutionary-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73935,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73890\/revisions\/73935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}