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Toy models

Posted by apascual on 20 Apr 2009 at 15:57 GMT

In my opinion, the best of the article is how they introduce the lattice models in order to get a physics-based model of evolution, where its's possible to relate genotype and phenotype. It's very nice to see how simple ideas are developed along years. The results obtained in this way are impressive, even if it is not very clear in how many of the succesful simulations it is found each of the properties discussed (this fact could generate some doubts about the robustness of them). But such a simple model gives insight about the dominance of a divergent evolution scenario.
I would like to find a deeper discussion about how parameter selection could influence the results. There are also some considerations (as the analytic solution of the genome size upper limit) that can be relaxed. As far as I know, there are not still published this results, that are announced by the authors in the paper, and I'm curious to see what happens if other conditions are considered. Could be very interesting to see the results if other ingredients, as horizontal transfer, are also considered. For example, the connectivity distribution of the structure similarity graph differ to the PDUG graph previously published on PNAS in two "outlier" points at high connectivity. Maybe if you consider other evolutive processes, you will find the same cluster distribution but with less links in the very big clusters, leading to a power law distribution at all scales ¿?
Nice (and funny) paper. I've enjoyed it.

No competing interests declared.