Evolution by natural selection can be subdivided in two classes of processes: selection and transmission [1]. This distinction is not congruent with the distinction between replicators and interactors that emerged in the units of selection debate [9, 14], but is implicitly used in much of population genetics theory [12]. Selection is considered as an operator acting on the frequency distribution of genotypes
but note that pw is the distribution of the parental genotypes after selection. The genotype distribution in the next generation is caused by another operator, called transmission
The transmission function describes the consequences of all the genetic processes producing the genotypes of the next generation, for instance mutation, recombination etc. The same abstraction is used to predict the selection response in quantitative genetics [4, 10, 18]. First one considers the change of the character mean value due to selection
The difference is called the selection differential
The mean value of the next generation is then predicted on the basis of the heritability
The difference between the character mean in the previous generation before selection and the offspring generation is call the selection response
Since there are two types of operators, selection- and transmission-operators, it is not entirely clear which one shall be used to construct the configuration space [15, 16]. Here we decided to use solely the transmission operator to construct configuration spaces for two reasons. First, the processes underlying the transmission operator, namely mutation and recombination, are the ones which generate new types in the course of adaptive search. They are thus the processes determining which types are reachable from a given type set and thus define "neighborhood" in a way relevant for the efficiency of the search procedure. Second, the sets on which the selection and transmission operators are acting are of very different kind. The selection operators acts on distributions over types while the transmission operators can be defined in a way in which they act on individual types directly.