The role of compensatory neutral mutations in molecular evolution | Semantic Scholar

It is shown that most of the phenotypic variation accessible through co-option would exist even in populations with no polymorphism, made possible by a history of compensatory evolution, whereby the phenotypes of a cryptic mutation at one site was balanced by mutations elsewhere in the genome, leading to a diversity of cryptic effect sizes across sites rather than across individuals.

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This introduction to more detailed papers that follow, which aim to provide an oversight of the field of population genetics, reviews current knowledge on mutation rates and their harmful and beneficial effects on fitness and considers theories that predict the fate of individual mutations or the consequences of mutation accumulation for quantitative traits.