The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Natural Selection and Mutability
Abstract
In sexual organisms, alleles increasing the mutation rate of the entire genome are invariably selected against, whereas in asexual organisms such "general mutators" are favored if they adjust the mutation rate closer to an optimum balancing the advantages of responsiveness to environmental change against those of a small mutational load. Unless very small selective pressures are effective, it seems that no mechanisms exist to establish optimum mutation rates in sexual organisms.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Drake, J. W., Charlesworth, B., Charlesworth, D., & Crow, J. F. (1998) · Genetics · doi:10.1093/genetics/148.4.1667 · Cited by 1,932
Genetic drift, selection and the evolution of the mutation rate
Lynch, M., Ackerman, M. S., Gout, J.-F., Long, H., Sung, W., Thomas, W. K., & Foster, P. L. (2016) · Nature Reviews Genetics · doi:10.1038/nrg.2016.104 · Cited by 911
Evolution of high mutation rates in experimental populations of E. coli
Sniegowski, P. D., Gerrish, P. J., & Lenski, R. E. (1997) · Nature · doi:10.1038/42701 · Cited by 879
High Mutation Frequencies Among Escherichia coli and Salmonella Pathogens
LeClerc, J. E., Li, B., Payne, W. L., & Cebula, T. A. (1996) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.274.5290.1208 · Cited by 817
The fate of competing beneficial mutations in an asexual population
Gerrish, P. J., & Lenski, R. E. (1998) · Genetica · doi:10.1023/a:1017067816551 · Cited by 772
Metadata
- Authors
- Leigh
- Venue
- The American Naturalist
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1970-05
- Volume
- 104
- Issue
- 937
- Pages
- 301-305
- ISSN
- 0003-0147 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5323
- OpenAlex
- W2057743071
- Cited by
- 194
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 0.48
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Natural Selection and Mutability. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/282663
- The paper
- Leigh. (1970). Natural Selection and Mutability. The American Naturalist. https://doi.org/10.1086/282663
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
