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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Generally they don't impact the reproduction rate enough.
Let's take reproductive cycles as an example of there being no single benefit or negative. Some species reproduce in mass quantities and that works for them, while others are slower. The fast one having genes that slow reproduction would probably die out because their adaptation of mass reproduction is what keeps them around. A slower reproducing species won't necessarily benefit from higher rates as they might overpopulate their range. So what looks like a detriment could just be a thing that neither benefits nor is a detriment depending on the complex context of the species and where they live.
And sometimes detriment are offset by other benefits, like sickle cell anemia having some terrible outcomes but it also protects against malaria so in the context of somewhere with a high rate of malaria it is beneficial to survive to a reproductive age, which would explain it sticking around.
Ah, so you haven't heard about this thing. It's not really lucky 10,000 territory, but it's still cool.
There are situations, where in sexually reproducing organisms, an unambiguously bad gene can spread through the population, just by ensuring it's more likely to appear in the next generation. As long as it's not so bad it kills the species off, you're still likely to observe it a lot in a future population. We've actually harnessed this idea technologically, with genetically modified mosquitoes that crash their local population by skewing all offspring malewards.
Richard Dawkins wrote a pop-sci book about it. Here's a list of examples on Wikipedia.
That is one example of 'not detrimental enough to impact reproduction' which I meant in the context of a population and not an individual, but I guess that my wording wasn't clear enough.