ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2017
Selection on skewed characters and the paradox of stasis.
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gene flow drives periods of both evolutionary stasis and change in a wild bird population.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Effect of Transformation of Non-Normal Fitness Trait Data on the Estimation of Genetic Parameters in Turkeys.Journal of animal breeding and genetics = Zeitschrift fur Tierzuchtung und Zuchtungsbiologie · 2025Article
- Conceptual and empirical bridges between micro- and macroevolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Review
- Dynamical BLUP modeling of reaction norm evolution, accommodating changing environments, overlapping generations, and multivariate data.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Decomposing phenotypic skew and its effects on the predicted response to strong selection.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Conceptualizing the evolutionary quantitative genetics of phenological life-history events: Breeding time as a plastic threshold trait.Evolution letters · 2022Article
- Directional selection and the evolution of breeding date in birds, revisited: Hard selection and the evolution of plasticity.Evolution letters · 2022Article
- Whose trait is it anyways? Coevolution of joint phenotypes and genetic architecture in mutualisms.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Evolutionary and ecological processes influencing chemical defense variation in an aposematic and mimeticPeerJ · 2021Article
- The Missing Response to Selection in the Wild.Trends in ecology & evolution · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Observed phenotypic responses to selection in the wild often differ from predictions based on measurements of selection and genetic variance. An overlooked hypothesis to explain this paradox of stasis is that a skewed phenotypic distribution affects natural selection and evolution. We show through mathematical modeling that, when a trait selected for an optimum phenotype has a skewed distribution, directional selection is detected even at evolutionary equilibrium, where it causes no change in the mean phenotype. When environmental effects are skewed, Lande and Arnold's (1983) directional gradient is in the direction opposite to the skew. In contrast, skewed breeding values can displace the mean phenotype from the optimum, causing directional selection in the direction of the skew. These effects can be partitioned out using alternative selection estimates based on average derivatives of individual relative fitness, or additive genetic covariances between relative fitness and trait (Robertson-Price identity). We assess the validity of these predictions using simulations of selection estimation under moderate sample sizes. Ecologically relevant traits may commonly have skewed distributions, as we here exemplify with avian laying date - repeatedly described as more evolutionarily stable than expected - so this skewness should be accounted for when investigating evolutionary dynamics in the wild.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.