Haldane's Sieve and Adaptation From the Standing Genetic Variation

Abstract

We consider populations that adapt to a sudden environmental change by fixing alleles found at mutation-selection balance. In particular, we calculate probabilities of fixation for previously deleterious alleles, ignoring the input of new mutations. We find that “Haldane's sieve”—the bias against the establishment of recessive beneficial mutations—does not hold under these conditions. Instead probabilities of fixation are generally independent of dominance. We show that this result is robust to patterns of sex expression for both X-linked and autosomal loci. We further show that adaptive evolution is invariably slower at X-linked than autosomal loci when evolution begins from mutation-selection balance. This result differs from that obtained when adaptation uses new mutations, a finding that may have some bearing on recent attempts to distinguish between hitchhiking and background selection by contrasting the molecular population genetics of X-linked vs. autosomal loci. Last, we suggest a test to determine whether adaptation used new mutations or previously deleterious alleles from the standing genetic variation.