Waiting for two mutations:
with applications to regulatory sequence evolution
and the limits of Darwinian evolution
Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt
Abstract.
Results of Nowak and collaborators concerning the onset of cancer due to the inactivation of tumor suppresor genes
give the distribution of the time until some individual in a population has experienced two prespecified
mutations, and the time until this mutant phenotype becomes fixed in the population. In this article we apply
these results to obtain insights into regulatory sequence evolution in Drosophila and humans. In particular, we examine the waiting time for a pair of mutations, the first of which inactivates an existing transcription factor binding site and the second which creates a new one. Consistent with recent experimental observations for Drosophila, we find that a few million years is sufficient, but for humans with a much smaller effective population size, this type of change would take more than 100 million years. In addition, we use these results to expose flaws in some of Michael Behe's arguments concerning mathematical limits to Darwinian evolution.
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