The probability that a lethal or nonfunctional gene is fixed at autosomal duplicate gene loci is studied. It is shown that this probability is highly dependent on population size, heterozygous effect of lethal genes, and recombination value between duplicate genes. If effective population size is smaller than 2,000 and lethal genes are completely recessive, the probability that a lethal gene is fixed at one of two duplicate gene loci is high even if they are not linked. If the number of duplicate loci is large and they are linked, the chance that some of them become nonfunctional is even higher, provided lethal genes are completely recessive. This study supports the postulate that there are a large number of nonfunctional genes accumulated in the genomes of higher organisms.
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Nei et al. (1973) studied this question.
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