Abstract

Penna's bit-string model of biological ageing due to the accumulation of deleterious mutations is generalized to allow for more than one disease per year. The results remain qualitatively unchanged except for a more complicated non-monotonic approach to equilibrium. We also look at "mutational meltdown", the extinction of the whole population if all mutations are deleterious and heritable, and why the Penna model can escape this extinction. No dependence on population size is found for mutational meltdown, with up to 108 individuals.

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