Friday, February 15, 2013

Another way to think about it

Antagonistic pleiotropy in senescence is "good first"; "bad later". What I was thinking about in the previous post is the opposite: "bad first"; "good later" (but still before/during reproduction).  Generally, the bad aspects of juveniles during development are made up for by parenting.  The parental contribution masks what would otherwise be an essentially lethal fitness defect in the developing offspring.  But that parenting can go easy or hard.  The parents want to maximize the efficiency of their contribution, so the best offspring to have are "easy" offspring that don't cost a lot of effort.  The "bad" in the converse antagonistic pleiotropy would be aspects that run up against the maximum threshold of effort the parents are willing/able to give.  Still more thinking to be done on this...

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