Causes of maladaptation

Maladaptation and natural selection.

The transformations George Williams initiated in evolutionary biology seem so blindingly obvious in retrospect that they spur the question of why he saw what no one else did. While most humans are prone to see only what theory predicts, Williams sees in bold relief whatever does not fit. Not an adaptationist or an anti-adaptationist, Williams is better described as a maladaptionist. The challen...

Visual maladaptation in contrast domain

In this work we simulate the effect of the human eye’s maladaptation to visual perception over time through a supra–threshold contrast perception model that comprises adaptation mechanisms. Specifically, we attempt to visualize maladapted vision on a display device. Given the scene luminance, the model computes a measure of perceived multi–scale contrast by taking into account spatially and tem...

Is Strong Reciprocity a Maladaptation?

Maladaptation and the Paradox of Robustness in Evolution

BACKGROUND Organisms use a variety of mechanisms to protect themselves against perturbations. For example, repair mechanisms fix damage, feedback loops keep homeostatic systems at their setpoints, and biochemical filters distinguish signal from noise. Such buffering mechanisms are often discussed in terms of robustness, which may be measured by reduced sensitivity of performance to perturbation...

Maladaptation of critical cellular functions in asthma: bioinformatic analysis.

Small maladaptations in cellular response to environmental stressors may underlie diseases like asthma. However, genomewide transcriptional profile comparisons between case and controls only highlight the quantitatively largest changes. Critical cellular homeostatic pathways may be upregulated modestly during normal adaptation to stress but insufficiently during disease. To discover such pathwa...