A recombination fitness landscape is then a function from the genotypes in a P-structure to the real numbers. Here we generalize this framework to include the effect of genotype frequencies, assuming linkage equilibrium. We find that the autocorrelation on the eigenfunctions of the population weighted P-structure is independent of the population composition. As a consequence we can directly compare the performance of mutation and recombination operators by comparing the auto-correlations on the finite set of elementary landscapes. Furthermore we find that the autocorrelation on any landscape is increasing as the distribution of genotypes becomes more extreme, i.e. if the population occupies a location close to the boundary of the frequency simplex.
Landscapes are smoother the more biased the distribution of genotype frequencies is.
We suggest that this result explains the paradox that there is little epistatic interaction for quantitative traits detected in natural populations if one uses variance decomposition methods while there is evidence for strong interactions in molecular mapping studies for quantitative trait loci. Submitted to Bull. All rights reserved.