Submitted by insink2300 t3_11drr8s in askscience
platoprime t1_jabkv8x wrote
Reply to comment by Tiny_Rat in Why does temperature determine the sex of certain egg laying animals like crocodiles? by insink2300
Even neutral mutations are working against entropy if there isn't a pressure keeping it around. Sure you could have a three generation neutral->advantageous or even a twenty generation disadvantageous->advantageous. In the same sense you could phase through a wall if your electrons all randomly lined up.
owiseone23 t1_jac0yw0 wrote
it's not uncommon for traits to evolve across "fitness valleys". That is, a trait with positive fitness that requires multiple generations to evolve with intermediate generations having negative fitness.
With a large population and a lot of time, random variation makes it possible to evolve across fitness valleys.
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