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)
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)