In population genetics, the Hill–Robertson effect, or Hill–Robertson interference, is a phenomenon first identified by Bill Hill and Alan Robertson in 1966.
In a population of finite but effective size which is subject to natural selection, varying extents of linkage disequilibria (LD) will occur.
These can be caused by genetic drift or by mutation, and they will tend to slow down the process of evolution by natural selection.
[2] There tends to be a correlation between the rate of recombination and the likelihood of the preferred haplotype (in the above example labeled as AB) goes into fixation in a population.
[3] Joe Felsenstein (1974)[4] showed this effect to be mathematically identical to the Fisher–Muller model proposed by R. A. Fisher (1930)[5] and H. J. Muller (1932),[6] although the verbal arguments were substantially different.