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)
Famous quotes containing the words fitness and/or landscape:
“Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of children.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)