"Anon."  wrote in message
news:cav343$tgj$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> As for epistasis, if something isn't heritable, then it can't be
> inherited.  Genetic epistatic effects can be inherited (because groups
> of genes can be inherited together), and hence does not come under what
> I was suggesting.

Pardon me for butting in, but some time ago I told John that the
reason that non-additive epistatic effects are usually omitted
from evolutionary models is that such effects are not effectively
heritable.  Was this incorrect?

In saying this, I had in mind the situation in which the two loci
are on different chromosomes.  I (and John, I think) realize that
there is some heritability  when the loci are in the same linkage
group, but it seems to me that weak linkage cannot be a factor
in long term evolution.  Strong linkage, of course, might be a
factor, but this doesn't argue against the adequacy of the models
because a strongly linked cluster of loci can be treated as a
single "super-gene" in the additive models.
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