Population Genetics of Gene Function

This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of an organism, this observation contributes to extend the population-genetical characterisation of biological function. To support this statement a mathematical relation is derived to link the lifetime ratio T ₁/T ₂, which parameterizes the different survival ability of two phenotypes, with population variables that quantify the amount of neutral variation underlying a population’s phenotypic distribution.