# Different worlds

Some time ago, I gave a seminar about some work involving chicken combs, and I made some offhand remark about how I don’t think that the larger combs of modern layer chickens are the result of direct selection. I think it is more likely to be be a correlated response to selection on reproductive traits. During question time, someone disagreed, proposing that ornamental traits should be very likely to have been under artificial selection.

I choose this example partly because the stakes are so low. I may very well be wrong, but it doesn’t matter for the work at hand. Clearly, I should be more careful to acknowledge all plausible possibilities, and not speculate so much for no reason. But I think this kind of thing is an example of something quite common.

That is: researchers, even those who fit snugly into the same rather narrow sub-field, may make quite different default assumptions about the world. I suspect, for instance, that we were both, in the absence of hard evidence, trying to be conservative in falling back on the most parsimonious explanation. I know that I think of a trait being under direct selection as a strong claim, and ”it may just be hitch-hiking on something else” as a conservative attitude. But on the other hand, one could think of direct artificial selection as a simpler explanation as opposed to a scenario that demands pleiotropy.

I can see a point to both attitudes, and in different contexts, I’d probably think of either direct selection and pleiotropy as the more far-fetched. For example, I am hard pressed to believe that reductions in fearfulness and changes in pigmentation of domestic animals are generally explained by pleiotropic variants.

This is why I think that arguments about Occam’s razor, burdens of proof, and what the appropriate ”null” hypothesis for a certain field is supposed to be, while they may be appealing (especially so when they support your position), are fundamentally unhelpful. And this is why I think incommensurability is not that outlandish a notion. Sometimes, researchers might as well be living in different worlds.

# Mutation, selection, and drift (with Shiny)

Imagine a gene that comes in two variants, where one of them is deleterious to the carrier. This is not so hard to imagine, and it is often the case. Most mutations don’t matter at all. Of those that matter, most are damaging.

Next, imagine that the mutation happens over and over again with some mutation rate. This is also not so hard. After all, given enough time, every possible DNA sequence should occur, as if by monkeys and typewriters. In this case, since we’re talking about the deleterious mutation rate, we don’t even need exactly the same DNA sequence to occur; rather, what is important is how often a class of mutations with the same consequences happen.

Let’s illustrate this with a Shiny app! I made this little thing that draws graphs like this:

This is supposed to show the trajectory of a deleterious genetic variant, with sliders to decide the population size, mutation rate, selection, dominance, and starting frequency. The lines are ten replicate populations, followed for 200 generations. The red line is the estimated equilibrium frequency — where the population would end up if it was infinitely large and not subject to random chance.

The app runs here: https://mrtnj.shinyapps.io/mutation/
And the code is here: https://github.com/mrtnj/shiny_mutation

(Note: I don’t know how well this will work if every blog reader clicks on that link. Maybe it all crashes or the bandwidth runs out or whatnot. If so, you can always download the code and run in RStudio.)

We assume diploid genetics, random mating, and mutation only in one direction (broken genes never restore themselves). As in typical population genetics texts, we call the working variant ”A” and the working variant ”a”, and their frequencies p and q. The genotypes AA, Aa and aa will have frequencies $p^2$, $2 p q$ and $q^2$ before selection.

Damaging variants tend to be recessive, that is, they hurt only when you have two of them. Imagine an enzyme that makes some crucial biochemical product, that you need some but not a lot of. If you have one working copy of the enzyme, you may be perfectly fine, but if you are left without any working copy, you will have a deficit. We can describe this by a dominance coefficient called h. If the dominance coefficient is one, the variant is completely dominant, so that it damages you even if you only have one copy. If the dominance coefficient is zero, the variant is completely recessive, and having one copy of it does not affect you at all.

The average reproductive success (”fitness”) of each genotype is described in terms of selection coefficients, which tells us how much selection there is against a genotype. Selection coefficients range from 0, which means that you’re winning, to 1 which means that you’ve been completely out-competed. For a recessive damaging variant, the AA homozygotes and Aa heterozygotes are unaffected, but the aa homozygotes suffers selection coefficient s.

In the general case, fitness values for each genotype are 1 for AA, $1 - hs$ for Aa and $1 - s$ for aa. We can think of this as the probability of contributing to the next generation.

What about the red line in the graphs? If natural selection keeps removing a mutation from the gene pool, and mutation keeps adding it back in again there may be some equilibrium frequency where they cancel out, and the frequency of the damaging variant is more or less constant. This is called mutation–selection balance.

Haldane (1937) came up with an expression for the equilibrium variant frequency:

$q_{eq} = \frac {h s + \mu - \sqrt{ (hs - \mu)^2 + 4 s \mu } } {2 h s - 2 s}$

I’ve changed his notation a bit to use h and s for dominance and selection coefficient. $\mu$ is the mutation rate. It’s not easy to see what is going on here, but we can draw it in the graph, and see that it’s usually very small. In these small populations, where drift is a major player, the variants are often completely lost, or drift to higher frequency by chance.

(I don’t know if I can recommend learning by playing with an app, but I definitely learned things while making it. For instance that C++11 won’t work on shinyapps.io unless you send the compiler a flag, and that it’s important to remember that both variants in a diploid organism can mutate. So I guess what I’m saying is: don’t use my app, but make your own. Or something.)

Literature

Haldane, J. B. S. ”The effect of variation of fitness.” The American Naturalist 71.735 (1937): 337-349.

# Morning coffee: multilevel drift

There is an abstract account of natural selection (Lewontin 1970) where one observes that any population of entities, whatever they may be, will evolve through natural selection if (1) there is variation, that (2) affects reproductive success, and (3) is heritable.

I don’t know how I missed this before, but it recently occurred to me that there must be a similarly abstract account of drift, where a population will evolve through drift if there is (1) variation, (2) that is heritable, and (3) sampling due to finite population size.

Drift may not be negligible, especially since at a higher level of organization, the population size should be smaller, making natural selection relatively less efficient.

# Toying with models: The Game of Life with selection

Conway’s Game of life is probably the most famous cellular automaton, consisting of a grid of cells developing according simple rules. Today, we’re going to add mutation and selection to the game, and let patterns evolve.

The fate of a cell depends on the number cells that live in the of neighbouring positions. A cell with fewer than two neighbours die from starvation. A cell with more than three neighbours die from overpopulation. If a position is empty and has three neighbours, it will be filled by a cell. These rules lead to some interesting patterns, such as still lives that never change, oscillators that alternate between states, patterns that eventually die out but take long time to do so, patterns that keep generating new cells, and so forth.

When I played with the Game of life when I was a child, I liked one pattern called ”virus”, that looked a bit like this. On its own, a grid of four-by-four blocks is a still life, but add one cell (the virus), and the whole pattern breaks. This is a version on a 30 x 30 cell board. It unfolds rather slowly, but in the end, a glider collides with a block, and you are left with some oscillators.

There are probably other interesting ways that evolution could be added to the game of life. We will take a hierarchical approach where the game is taken to describe development, and the unit of selection is the pattern. Each generation, we will create a variable population of patterns, allow them to develop and pick the fittest. So, here the term ”development” refers to what happens to a pattern when applying the rules of life, and the term ”evolution” refers to how the population of patterns change over the generations. This differ slightly from Game of life terminology, where ”evolution” and ”generation” usually refer to the development of a pattern, but it is consistent with how biologists use the words: development takes place during the life of an organism, and evolution happens over the generations as organisms reproduce and pass on their genes to offspring. I don’t think there’s any deep analogy here, but we can think of the initial state of the board as the heritable material that is being passed on and occasionally mutated. We let the pattern develop, and at some point, we apply selection.

First, we need an implementation of the game of life in R. We will represent the board as a matrix of ones (live cells) and zeroes (empty positions). Here is function develops the board one tick in time. After dealing with the corners and edges, it’s very short, but also slow as molasses. The next function does this for a given number of ticks.

## Develop one tick. Return new board matrix.
develop <- function(board_matrix) {
padded <- rbind(matrix(0, nrow = 1, ncol = ncol(board_matrix) + 2),
cbind(matrix(0, ncol = 1, nrow = nrow(board_matrix)),
board_matrix,
matrix(0, ncol = 1, nrow = nrow(board_matrix))),
matrix(0, nrow = 1, ncol = ncol(board_matrix) + 2))
for (i in 2:(nrow(padded) - 1)) {
for (j in 2:(ncol(padded) - 1)) {
if (neighbours < 2 | neighbours > 3) {
new_board[i, j] <- 0
}
if (neighbours == 3) {
new_board[i, j] <- 1
}
}
}
}

## Develop a board a given number of ticks.
tick <- function(board_matrix, ticks) {
if (ticks > 0) {
for (i in 1:ticks) {
board_matrix <- develop(board_matrix)
}
}
board_matrix
}


We introduce random mutations to the board. We will use a mutation rate of 0.0011 per cell, which gives us a mean of a bout one mutation for a 30 x 30 board.

## Mutate a board
mutate <- function(board_matrix, mutation_rate) {
mutated <- as.vector(board_matrix)
outcomes <- rbinom(n = length(mutated), size = 1, prob = mutation_rate)
for (i in 1:length(outcomes)) {
if (outcomes[i] == 1)
mutated[i] <- ifelse(mutated[i] == 0, 1, 0)
}
matrix(mutated, ncol = ncol(board_matrix), nrow = nrow(board_matrix))
}


I was interested in the virus pattern, so I decided to apply a simple directional selection scheme for number of cells at tick 80, which is a while after the virus pattern has stabilized itself into oscillators. We will count the number of cells at tick 80 and call that ”fitness”, even if it actually isn’t (it is a trait that affects fitness by virtue of the fact that we select on it). We will allow the top half of the population to produce two offspring each, thus keeping the population size constant at 100 individuals.

## Calculates the fitness of an individual at a given time
get_fitness <- function(board_matrix, time) {
board_matrix %>% tick(time) %>% sum
}

## Develop a generation and calculate fitness
grow <- function(generation) {
generation$fitness <- sapply(generation$board, get_fitness, time = 80)
generation
}

## Select a generation based on fitness, and create the next generation,
next_generation <- function(generation) {
keep <- order(generation$fitness, decreasing = TRUE)[1:50] new_generation <- list(board = vector(mode = "list", length = 100), fitness = numeric(100)) ix <- rep(keep, each = 2) for (i in 1:100) new_generation$board[[i]] <- generation$board[[ix[i]]] new_generation$board <- lapply(new_generation$board, mutate, mutation_rate = mu) new_generation } ## Evolve a board, with mutation and selection for a number of generation. evolve <- function(board, n_gen = 10) { generations <- vector(mode = "list", length = n_gen) generations[[1]] <- list(board = vector(mode = "list", length = 100), fitness = numeric(100)) for (i in 1:100) generations[[1]]$board[[i]] <- board
generations[[1]]$board <- lapply(generations[[1]]$board, mutate, mutation_rate = mu)

for (i in 1:(n_gen - 1)) {
generations[[i]] <- grow(generations[[i]])
generations[[i + 1]] <- next_generation(generations[[i]])
}
generations[[n_gen]] <- grow(generations[[n_gen]])
generations
}


Let me now tell you that I was almost completely wrong about what happens with this pattern once you apply selection. I thought that the initial pattern of nine stable blocks (36 cells) was pretty good, and that it would be preserved for long, and that virus-like patterns (like the first animation above) would mostly have degenerated around 80. As this plot of the evolution of the number of cells in one replicate shows, I grossly underestimated this pattern. The y-axis is number of cells at time 80, and the x-axis individuals, the vertical lines separating generations. Already by generation five, most individuals do better than 36 cells in this case:

As one example, here is the starting position and the state at time 80 for a couple of individuals from generation 10 of one of my replicates:

Here is how the average cell number at time 80 evolves in five replicates. Clearly, things are still going on at generation 10, not only in the replicate shown above.

Here is the same plot for the virus pattern I showed above, i.e. the blocks but with one single added cell, fixed in the starting population. Prior genetic architecture matters. Even if the virus pattern has fewer cells than the blocks pattern at time 80, it is apparently a better starting point to quickly evolve more cells:

And finally, out of curiosity, what happens if we start with an empty 30 x 30 board?

Not much. The simple still life block evolves a lot. But in my replicate three, this creature emerged. ”Life, uh, finds a way.”

Unfortunately, many of the selected patterns extended to the edges of the board, making them play not precisely the game of life, but the game of life with edge effects. I’d like to use a much bigger board and see how far patterns extend. It would also be fun to follow them longer. To do that, I would need to implement a more efficient way to update the board (this is very possible, but I was lazy). It would also be fun to select for something more complex, with multiple fitness components, potentially in conflict, e.g. favouring patterns that grow large at a later time while being as small as possible at an earlier time.

Code is on github, including functions to display and animate boards with the animation package and ImageMagick, and code for the plots. Again, the blocks_selection.R script is slow, so leave it running and go do something else.