Mean selective values, error thresholds

Appendix 6. Brillouin-Wigner Perturbation Theory of the Quasi-species. Appendix 7. Renormalization of the Perturbation Theory Appendix 8. Statistical Convergence of Perturbation Theory Appendix 9. Variables, Mean Rate Constants, and Mean Selective Values for the Relaxed Error Threshold... 

Figure 12. The error threshold of replication and mutation in phenotype space. The genotypic error threshold approaches zero in the case of selective neutrality. Despite changing genotypes a phenotype may be conserved in evolution whenever it has higher fitness than the other phenotypes in the population. The concept of error threshold can easily be extended to competition between phenotypes. The distribution of phenotypes is stationary provided the error rate does not exceed the maximum value pmax which is a function of the mean fraction of nearest neighbors, X, and the superiority of the master phenotype, a. The illustration shows the position of the phenotypic error threshold in the X, p plane. Selective neutrality allows more errors to be tolerated and pmax increases accordingly with increasing X. If X approaches the inverse superiority, X — a-1, the tolerated error may grow to pmax = 1, and this means the phenotype will never be lost, no matter how many errors are made in replication.

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