Why Recessive Lethal Alleles Have Not Disappeared?
Jorma Jormakka
Department of Communications and Networking, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland.
Sourangshu Ghosh
*
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The article derives the probability for lethal recessive alleles in the case of recessive disadvantage or advantage. It is shown that recessive advantage of a lethal gene can be detected by the ratio of heterozygotes and homozygotes. This demonstrates that higher IQ of certain ethnic groups cannot be explained by recessive advantage of lethal genes. The article shows that lethal genes can survive in the population if some lineages of families have much more children than the average.
Keywords: Recessive alleles, heterozygote advantage, lethal genes, hardy-weinberg equilibrium, markov model