Talk:Muller's ratchet
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This article needs loads of rewriting. The introductory concept is very vague, and it also fails to indicate the importance of random drift in spreading and fixing the deleterious mutants. Defining the Muller's ratchet as happening in asexual populations is perhaps innapropriate, it is simply better to define it as what happens in chromosomes when there is lack of recombination. There is recombination in asexual genomes, so this is not a simple feature of asexual populations, also, some sexual populations show non-recombinant regions, so again the definition is not appropriate. A figure showing the ratchet mechanisms would be very useful.
80.41.59.236 11:57, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
The statement "It is instead quite clear that the genomes of mitochondria and chloroplasts do not recombine and would undergo Muller's ratchet were they not as small as they are" is 100% BS. In fact, mitochondria have multiple copies (65 each in humans) of their circular chromosomes, and they many recombine within a mitochondria for all we know (or between mitochondria inside a cell, since most cells have dozens of of them). Certainly their smallness in no way leads to their avoiding Muller's ratchet--after all, some bacteria are smaller. 129.252.89.201 06:48, 7 January 2007 (UTC)speciate
