Question

A few years ago, researchers were swept up in something of a symmetry craze. The idea was that you could understand something fundamental about an individual’s quality (genetic or otherwise) by measuring its symmetry. A very symmetric individual was taken to be of high quality, while a highly asymmetric one was seen as having low quality. People studied everything from birds, to people, to flowers. But then, a handful of quantitative geneticists made two related discoveries. The first was that if you plotted offspring asymmetry against parent asymmetry, there was no relationship. The second was that if you selected on asymmetry, only letting the most asymmetric parents breed for several generations, the degree of asymmetry in the population was unchanged. What is going on here? Explain you answer.

Answer 1