Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Disruptive selection is a specific type of natural selection that actively selects against the intermediate in a population, favoring both extremes of the spectrum. Disruptive selection is inferred to oftentimes lead to sympatric speciation through a phyletic gradualism mode of evolution. Disruptive selection can be caused or influenced by ...
The uncommon disruptive selection also acts during transition periods when the current mode is sub-optimal, but alters the trait in more than one direction. In particular, if the trait is quantitative and univariate then both higher and lower trait levels are favoured. Disruptive selection can be a precursor to speciation. [57]
The Luria–Delbrück experiment (1943) (also called the Fluctuation Test) demonstrated that in bacteria, genetic mutations arise in the absence of selective pressure rather than being a response to it. Thus, it concluded Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations applies to bacteria as well as to more complex organisms.
Fluctuating selection is a mode of natural selection characterized by the fluctuation of the direction of selection on a given phenotype over a relatively brief period of evolutionary time. For example, a species of plant may come in two varieties: one which prefers wetter soil and one which prefers dryer soil.
It is the selection against the heterozygote, causing disruptive selection [2] and divergent genotypes. Underdominance exists in situations where the heterozygotic genotype is inferior in fitness to either the dominant or recessive homozygotic genotype.
This selection is an important mechanism in the selection of complex and diversifying traits, and is also a primary force of speciation. [7] Changes in a genotype and consequently a phenotype can either be advantageous, harmful, or neutral and depend on the environment in which the phenotypic shift is happening.
In general, two types of experiments have been conducted: using artificial selection to mimic natural selection that eliminates the hybrids (often called "destroy-the-hybrids"), and using disruptive selection to select for a trait (regardless of its function in sexual reproduction).
Natural selection has driven the ptarmigan to change from snow camouflage in winter to disruptive coloration suiting moorland in summer. Selective breeding transformed teosinte's small spikes (left) into modern maize (right). Darwin argued that evolution worked in a similar way.