Talk:Error catastrophe

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Not!

This article explains the Error Catastrophe by mistaking it for extinction due to mutational load. That is not what the Error Catastrophe is. Orgel's original description was that the error rate (in his case, of protein synthesis) increased as errors occurred, some of them damaging the proteins that synthesized proteins. In the life of the cell line, this led to exponentially increasing error rates of protein synthesis.

It is not unfair to apply it to (say) viral replication, but the effect would then be of mutations on increasing the mutation rate. I don't see that in the present, long-winded article. Felsenst 22:45, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

On further thought: The term "error catastrophe" is firmly ensconced in the virology literature as a synonym for "extinction due to too high a mutational load." It is quite distinct from Orgel's original phenomenon, which involves errors that raise the rate of future errors, a feedback loop. The only way that the virological scenarios can be thought of as involving an error catastrophe in Orgel's sense is to have a lowered rate of reproduction, owing to lowered survival or slower reproduction, to be considered as somehow involving not less reproduction but reproduction of defective individuals. Thus a virus that is expected to have 10 offspring instead of a normal number of 20 (say) is somehow considered to have had 10 normal and 10 defective offspring. This is a forced analogy. Perhaps the best the Wikipedia page can do is to say that there are two definitions of error catastrophe and that one is a synonym for extinction due to high mutational load. Felsenst 05:42, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Criticism

There is a paragraph at the end of section "Basic Mathematical Model" which criticises the assumptions and claims that the phenomenon has not been convincingly shown to occur. Such a discussion should get a seperate section. Howver, without citations this criticism appears rather to be an opinion and debatable. If nothing else happens I'll remove the paragraph in 2-6 weeks. (now : Oct.9th 2009) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.183.101.86 (talk) 01:20, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Confusing Mathematics

Not a great page. The equations are just kind of thrown up there, and incompletely annotated. E.g., what does s stand for? Who knows? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.32.109.141 (talk) 05:04, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

I've added a simpler version of the mathematics, taken from the book The Organic Codes by Barbieri. (under the section information-theory based presentation.) Unfortunately Barbieri does not totally define his S either; he says, "The systems that make many errors are more heavily penalized by the environment than those that make few errors, and this can be quantified by associating to any system a selection factor S (systems that make no error have a selective advanage S over those that make one, these have a selective advantage S over those that make two, and so on). The selective advantage is therefore a probability of surviving..."Dranorter (talk) 06:26, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Clinical Trials

I deleted the whole section with the clinical trials. This article is not the place for detailed updates about any clinical trials and it seems the whole bit was created by a single purpose account of a small pharma company to publicize their product (they are looking for investors). SPLETTE :] ^{How's my driving?} 21:03, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose that mutational meltdown be merged into error catastrophe. They cover very similar (almost synonymous topics). For the moment I have made sure that they link to each other. What do people think? T. Shafee (Evo&Evo) (talk) 03:50, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm just a drive-by here, but I'd favor the merge. I often link to various articles on issues surrounding inbreeding and genetic disease when I work on articles about horse breeds, and I often find them poorly written and all but incomprehensible to the non-geneticist (me). Montanabw^(talk) 21:06, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely not. Mutational meltdown and error catastrophe are completely different concepts, but unfortunately often confused in the virology literature. See e.g. this article or this article. However, the current error threshold article is largely wrong and needs to be fixed, as outlined in the two papers I just linked to. Wilke (talk) 21:44, 16 May 2015 (UTC)