neutrality theory

biological sciences

Learn about this topic in these articles:

In evolution: Molecular biology and Earth sciences
…geneticist Motoo Kimura proposed the neutrality theory of molecular evolution, which assumes that, at the level of the sequences of nucleotides in DNA and of amino acids in proteins, many changes are adaptively neutral; they have little or no effect on the molecule’s function and thus on an organism’s fitness…
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In evolution: The neutrality theory of molecular evolution
In the late 1960s it was proposed that at the molecular level most evolutionary changes are selectively “neutral,” meaning that they are due to genetic drift rather than to natural selection. Nucleotide and amino acid substitutions appear in a population…
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