MASKING DELETERIOUS EFFECTS. “In small populations, such as those typical of most multicellular organisms, robustness evolves by masking the harmful effects of deleterious mutations, often by making certain functions redundant. Examples of such mechanisms include gene duplication, alternative metabolic pathways, or chaperone proteins that buffer against mutation-induced problems in other enzymes.”
https://lnkd.in/e9KGgbm