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The Time Scale of Evolutionary Innovation

Figure 4

Regeneration process.

Gene duplication (or possibly some other process) generates a steady stream of starting sequences that are a constant number of mutations away from the target. Many searches drift away from the target, but some will succeed in polynomially many steps. We prove that searches ensure that with high probability some search succeed in polynomially many steps.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003818.g004