Antagonistic pleiotropy, dominance, and genetic variation

Though these models are not very robust, they do illustrate in principle one means of explaining recent experimental findings concerning the quantitative genetics of components of fitness in populations free of inbreeding.

Abstract

Although the importance of antagonistic pleiotropy of genes affecting components of fitness has long been argued, explicit population genetic models involving pleiotropy have only recently been developed. Simple, deterministic models of this kind are given, and then analyzed for conditions sufficient for protected polymorphism. It is found that dominance in gene action plays a key role in fostering the establishment of polymorphism in these models. However, the genetic variance for individual fitness components generally remains predominantly additive in spite of this. Though these models are not very robust, they do illustrate in principle one means of explaining recent experimental findings concerning the quantitative genetics of components of fitness in populations free of inbreeding.