“This increases the potential number of semi-meaningful bases (bases such that some mutations have no effect but other mutations have detrimental effect) but cancels out the ability to store any increased information in such bases.”
If 27% of all mutations have absolutely no effect, the “one mutation = one death” rule is broken, and so more information can be stored because the effective mutation rate is lower (this also means, of course, that the rate of beneficial mutations is lower). So it may be a 40 MB bound instead of a 25 MB bound, but it doesn’t change the basic conclusion.
“If the environment shifts, the homogeneous population may be wiped out but part of the diverse population may survive.”
If you start postulating group selection arguments, you won’t be able to understand evolution clearly. And the professional evolutionary biologists will think of you as a crackpot. And your dog will get sick and die.
“But all species are considered to be descendants of the same LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), and there is no mathematical reason to consider each species separately.”
If the species have stopped interbreeding, deletrious mutations can accumulate in each species independently. Evolution is a mathematical process which does not care what happened ten million years ago.
“What you forget to take into account is that a growing population changes the conditions of the population, and changes selection pressure.”
Yes, that’s precisely the point. If you have a long period of weak selection pressure, the population will increase and selection pressure will increase. If you have a long period of strong selection pressure, the population will decrease (unless the species is driven to extinction). Hence, you can reliably predict an average selection pressure, because the two must balance each other out.
“The next step should be to try and find some mathematics that applies to non-equilibrium states. Maybe then you can draw some conclusions about the real world.”
This has probably already been done.
“The thing is that evolution is not just a thing of species, evolution takes places at all those levels”
I repeat: if you use group selection arguments, your dog will get sick and die.
“This increases the potential number of semi-meaningful bases (bases such that some mutations have no effect but other mutations have detrimental effect) but cancels out the ability to store any increased information in such bases.”
If 27% of all mutations have absolutely no effect, the “one mutation = one death” rule is broken, and so more information can be stored because the effective mutation rate is lower (this also means, of course, that the rate of beneficial mutations is lower). So it may be a 40 MB bound instead of a 25 MB bound, but it doesn’t change the basic conclusion.
“If the environment shifts, the homogeneous population may be wiped out but part of the diverse population may survive.”
If you start postulating group selection arguments, you won’t be able to understand evolution clearly. And the professional evolutionary biologists will think of you as a crackpot. And your dog will get sick and die.
“But all species are considered to be descendants of the same LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), and there is no mathematical reason to consider each species separately.”
If the species have stopped interbreeding, deletrious mutations can accumulate in each species independently. Evolution is a mathematical process which does not care what happened ten million years ago.
“What you forget to take into account is that a growing population changes the conditions of the population, and changes selection pressure.”
Yes, that’s precisely the point. If you have a long period of weak selection pressure, the population will increase and selection pressure will increase. If you have a long period of strong selection pressure, the population will decrease (unless the species is driven to extinction). Hence, you can reliably predict an average selection pressure, because the two must balance each other out.
“The next step should be to try and find some mathematics that applies to non-equilibrium states. Maybe then you can draw some conclusions about the real world.”
This has probably already been done.
“The thing is that evolution is not just a thing of species, evolution takes places at all those levels”
I repeat: if you use group selection arguments, your dog will get sick and die.