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      Permanent link:
      https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/jgen/101/0038

    • Keywords

       

      genetic conflicts; selfish genetic elements; randomization; John Rawls.

    • Abstract

       

      Gerrymandering, the structuring of voting districts to favour certain politicians and political groups, undermines fair elections and presents a serious challenge to democracy. We introduce a solution to gerrymandering inspired by the biological process of cell division in sexually reproducing organisms, meiosis, in which the boundaries of electorates are frequently redrawn by randomizing algorithms. By demonstrating the deep parallels between meiosis and John Rawls’s concept of a ‘veil of ignorance’, we also show how one of the biggestthreats to the integrity of meiosis—selfish genetic elements, genes that promote their own transmission at the expense of organismal fitness—can inspire another potential advantage to frequent random redistricting.

    • Author Affiliations

       

      J. ARVID ÅGREN1 2 DAVID HAIG1 DAKOTA E. McCOY1 3 4

      1. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
      2. Department of Evolutionary Biology, Uppsala University, 75236 Uppsala, Sweden
      3. Hopkins Marine Lab and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
      4. Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA

    • Dates

       
      Published
      29 August 2022
      Manuscript received
      14 March 2022
      Manuscript revised
      28 June 2022
      Accepted
      11 July 2022

  • Journal of Genetics | News

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      Posted on July 25, 2019

      Click here for Editorial Note on CAP Mode

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