Digest: The non-redundancy of non-ephemeral reproductive isolation

Abstract

What factors determine the stability of intrinsic reproductive barriers in the face of hybridization? In a set of theoretical analyses, Xiong and Mallet (2022) show that intrinsic incompatibilities are more prone to collapse when the incompatible genotypes encode biological functions with redundant genetic bases. These findings suggest that stable reproductive barriers often will be based on non-redundant genetic complexes that evolve among diverging lineages.