Evolution of genetic redundancy: the relevance of complexity in genotype–phenotype mapping

Genetic redundancy is ubiquitous and can be found in any organism. However, it has been argued that genetic redundancy reduces total population fitness, and therefore, redundancy is unlikely to evolve. In this letter, we study an evolutionary model with high-dimensional genotype-phenotype mapping (GPM) to investigate the relevance of complexity in GPM to the evolution of genetic redundancy. By applying the replica method to deal with quenched randomness, the redundancy dependence of the fitness is analytically obtained, which demonstrates that genetic redundancy can indeed evolve, provided that the GPM is complex. Our result provides a novel insight into how genetic redundancy evolves.