HomeGenetics & EvolutionSpeciation Snowball: Hybrid Incompatibility Simulator

Speciation Snowball: Hybrid Incompatibility Simulator

Interactive 3D Dobzhansky-Muller model: two populations diverge locus by locus after a founder split, and every derived-allele pairing that was never tested by selection can become a hybrid incompatibility -- watch reproductive isolation snowball with time since divergence.

Genetics & Evolution3DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 2D version
biology-ext-topic-38 ↗ Open standalone

Two founder populations evolve apart, each independently fixing new "derived" alleles across a shared set of genetic loci -- visualised as a lit genome bar over each population's 3D cluster. Because selection inside one lineage never gets to test its new alleles against the other lineage's, pairs of derived alleles can be secretly incompatible: a hidden interaction matrix marks which pairs would clash if ever brought together in a hybrid. Every generation the simulator recomputes how many such Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities exist between the two lineages' current genomes and renders a live F1 hybrid cloud whose colour and size track hybrid fitness in real time -- healthy and green when few incompatibilities exist, shrinking and fading toward orange as reproductive isolation snowballs with time since the split.

⚙ Under the hood

An interactive 3D Dobzhansky-Muller model where two founder populations independently fix new alleles each generation, and hidden epistatic incompatibilities between their derived alleles cause reproductive isolation in F1 hybrids to snowball with time since the split.

evolutionspeciationpopulation-geneticsreproductive-isolationgeneticshybrid-fitness

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install

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