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THE EVOLUTION OF DOMINANCE: A THEORY WHOSE TIME HAS PASSED?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1997

OLIVER MAYO  and
REINHARD BÜRGER
OLIVER MAYO
Affiliation:
CSIRO Division of Animal Production, Locked Bag 1, Delivery Centre, Blacktown, NSW, 2148, Australia
REINHARD BÜRGER
Affiliation:
Institut für Mathematik, Universität Wien, Austria
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Abstract

The evolution of dominance by the selection of modifiers of the phenotypes of deleterious mutations was proposed as a hypothesis by R. A. Fisher in 1928. It has been strongly criticized ever since, is regarded by many as having been made irrelevant by metabolic control theory, and most recently has been claimed to have been ‘falsified’ by H. A. Orr. Is it indeed not only obsolete but wrong? Its history is reviewed and its present status evaluated. We conclude (1) that it has a role as the explanation of the dominance found in many cases of selection through visual predation and (2) that the selection mechanism long claimed to be ineffective (the increase in frequency of a single modifier) will be effective under certain special conditions that may be different from those Fisher proposed.

Keywords

Evolutiondominancemetabolic control theorymimicryindustrial melanism
Type
Review Article
Information
Biological Reviews , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , February 1997 , pp. 97 - 110
Copyright
Cambridge Philosophical Society 1997

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