Fitness Landscape
A fitness landscape, first conceptualized by Sewall Wright, is a way of visualising fitness in terms of a high-dimensional surface, in which height indicates fitness, and each of the other dimensions represents allele identity for a different gene. Peaks correspond to local fitness maxima; it is often said that natural selection always progresses uphill but can only do so locally. This can result in suboptimal local maxima becoming stable, because natural selection cannot return to the less-fit "valleys" of the landscape on the way to reach higher peaks.
Read more about this topic: Fitness (biology)
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