The Heuristic Role of Sewall Wright's 1932 Adaptive Landscape Diagram

Skipper, Robert A.

doi:10.1086/425240

Cited by 49 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…More recently, Skipper (2004) has argued that both Provine and Ruse misunderstood the value of the landscape metaphor; Skipper argues that by focusing on the technical question of what was being visualized in the concrete drawings of it, both authors miss the real problems with Wright's interpretation, in part because they fail to treat the landscape metaphor as a tool for theory evaluation, focusing instead on the metaphors role as a heuristic crutch for the math-phobic (pp. 1180-1181).…”

Section: Heuristics and Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor?

Kaplan

2008

Biol Philos

129

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The concepts of adaptive/fitness landscapes and adaptive peaks are a central part of much of contemporary evolutionary biology; the concepts are introduced in introductory texts, developed in more detail in graduate-level treatments, and are used extensively in papers published in the major journals in the field. The appeal of visualizing the process of evolution in terms of the movement of populations on such landscapes is very strong; as one becomes familiar with the metaphor, one often develops the feeling that it is possible to gain deep insights into evolution by thinking about the movement of populations on landscapes consisting of adaptive valleys and peaks. But, since Wright first introduced the metaphor in 1932, the metaphor has been the subject of persistent confusion, from equivocation over just what the features of the landscape are meant to represent to how we ought to expect the landscapes to look. Recent advances-conceptual, empirical, and computational-have pointed towards the inadequacy and indeed incoherence of the landscapes as usually pictured. I argue that attempts to reform the metaphor are misguided; it is time to give up the pictorial metaphor of the landscape entirely and rely instead on the results of formal modeling, however difficult such results are to understand in 'intuitive' terms.

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Section: Heuristics and Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rejecting the ''Landscape'' image(s) As Skipper points out, on one plausible interpretation, the problem with Wright's landscapes was not that they were incoherent, but that Wright was wrong about the basic structure of the landscapes (Skipper 2004(Skipper , pp. 1180(Skipper -1181.…”

Section: Diagrams Metaphors and Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor?

Kaplan

2008

Biol Philos

129

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“…In particular they are widely used to determine attractors when the controlling parameters (f.i. genes in biology) are altered during system evolution (reviewed in Skipper, 2004), since they were introduced by Wright (1932). Energy is plotted within two coordinate axes along which the system evolves, thus determining a landscape with peaks and valleys.…”

Section: Use Of the Fitness Landscape Diagramsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chemical reactivity parameters (HSAB) applied to magma evolution and ore formation

Vigneresse

2012

Lithos

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“…Biological populations can evolve along this giant cluster by mutation and random drift and can diverge dramatically without the need to cross any fitness valleys or any help from selection. See Gavrilets and Gravner (1997); Gavrilets (1997Gavrilets ( , 2004Skipper (2004); Pigliucci and Kaplan (2006);Wilkins (2007) for discussions of biological and philosophical significance and implications of this important result.…”

Section: The Basic Case: Binary Hypercube and Independent Binary Fitnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Percolation on fitness landscapes: Effects of correlation, phenotype, and incompatibilities

Gravner

Pitman

Gavrilets

2007

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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We study how correlations in the random fitness assignment may affect the structure of fitness landscapes, in three classes of fitness models. The first is a phenotype space in which individuals are characterized by a large number n of continuously varying traits. In a simple model of random fitness assignment, viable phenotypes are likely to form a giant connected cluster percolating throughout the phenotype space provided the viability probability is larger than 1/2 n . The second model explicitly describes genotype-to-phenotype and phenotype-to-fitness maps, allows for neutrality at both phenotype and fitness levels, and results in a fitness landscape with tunable correlation length. Here, phenotypic neutrality and correlation between fitnesses can reduce the percolation threshold, and correlations at the point of phase transition between local and global are most conducive to the formation of the giant cluster. In the third class of models, particular combinations of alleles or values of phenotypic characters are "incompatible" in the sense that the resulting genotypes or phenotypes have zero fitness. This setting can be viewed as a generalization of the canonical BatesonDobzhansky-Muller model of speciation and is related to K-SAT problems, prominent in computer science. We analyze the conditions for the existence of viable genotypes, their number, as well as the structure and the number of connected clusters of viable genotypes. We show that analysis based on expected values can easily lead to wrong conclusions, especially when fitness correlations are strong. We focus on pairwise incompatibilities between diallelic loci, but we also address multiple alleles, complex incompatibilities, and continuous phenotype spaces. In the case of diallelic loci, the number of clusters is stochastically bounded and each cluster contains a very large sub-cube. Finally, we demonstrate that the discrete NK model shares some signature properties of models with high correlations.

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The Heuristic Role of Sewall Wright's 1932 Adaptive Landscape Diagram

Cited by 49 publications

References 25 publications

The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor?

The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor?

Chemical reactivity parameters (HSAB) applied to magma evolution and ore formation

Percolation on fitness landscapes: Effects of correlation, phenotype, and incompatibilities

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