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  Topic: Evolutionary Computation, Stuff that drives AEs nuts< Next Oldest | Next Newest >  
Steve Schaffner



Posts: 13
Joined: June 2009

(Permalink) Posted: June 11 2009,13:02   

I may have missed something, but I haven't seen anything in the v. 1.4.1 runs that was clearly wrong, i.e. that suggested a bug in the implementation (other than the broken option for fixed selection coefficient). Which doesn't mean there aren't any bugs, but they are not obvious.

What is clear is that the default parameters for beneficial alleles are very low. Their justification for having such a low maximum beneficial effect strikes me as plausible-sounding nonsense.

It's also clear that their basic model is not one from evolutionary biology. The essential process they're modeling is the accumulation of mildly deleterious mutations, ones that have such a small functional effect that they are invisible to natural selection. This only occurs because the population starts out in a state of genetic perfection, compared to which the new mutations are deleterious. A real population would never have become that optimized, precisely because the different choices of allele are indistinguishable by NS.

For those who have the program running . . . Can it provide more output? Comparing results with theory would be much more straightforward if one could count only the number of mutations that have fixed, rather than all present in the population; it would also be useful to see the allele frequency spectrum. (And if it can't do those things, then it is of no interest as a population genetics tool.)

  
  419 replies since Mar. 17 2009,11:00 < Next Oldest | Next Newest >  

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