期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：1974
卷号：71
期号：12
页码：4847-4849
DOI：10.1073/pnas.71.12.4847
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The hypothesis has been advanced that the pervasive protein variation found in natural populations of many organisms is adaptively neutral, and thus not subject to natural selection. This neutrality hypothesis predicts that at polymorphic gene loci different configurations of allelic frequencies will occur in different species. Results of an extensive study of protein variation in several species of Drosophila show that any two species have very similar allelic frequencies at a substantial proportion of all gene loci, while at many other loci the species have very different sets of alleles. Genetic distances have been calculated between pairs of subspecies, morphologically similar species, and morphologically different species. The distribution of genetic distances is strikingly different from the predictions of the neutrality theory. Protein variation appears to be maintained by natural selection.
