ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Testing the neutral hypothesis of phenotypic evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Phylogenetic congruence, conflict and consilience between molecular and morphological data.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Pooled it
- Repeatability of gene expression evolution in experimental environmental adaptation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- But the Clock, Tick-Tock: An Empirical Case Study Highlights the Preeminence of Relaxed Clock Models in Total-Evidence Dating.Systematic biology · 2026Article
- Transcriptomic and proteomic effects of gene deletion are not evolutionarily conserved.Genome research · 2025Article
- Where the "ruber" Meets the Road: Using the Genome of the Red Diamond Rattlesnake to Unravel the Evolutionary Processes Driving Venom Evolution.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Correlated evolution of conspicuous colouration and burrowing in crayfish.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Application of unimodal probability distribution models for morphological phenotyping of budding yeast.FEMS yeast research · 2024Article
- Evaluating the Accuracy of Methods for Detecting Correlated Rates of Molecular and Morphological Evolution.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- Patterns and evolutionary consequences of pleiotropy.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2023Article
- Detecting natural selection in trait-trait coevolution.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Environmental selection, rather than neutral processes, best explain regional patterns of diversity in a tropical rainforest fish.Heredity · 2023Article
- The genetics-morphology-behavior trifecta: Unraveling the single greatest limitation affecting our understanding of chondrichthyan evolution.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Gene loss and compensatory evolution promotes the emergence of morphological novelties in budding yeast.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Mammalian splicing divergence is shaped by drift, buffering inLife science alliance · 2022Article
- Assignment of unimodal probability distribution models for quantitative morphological phenotyping.BMC biology · 2022Article
- Evolution of flower allometry and pigmentation in Mammillaria haageana (Cactaceae).BMC plant biology · 2022Article
- Caution in testing phenotypic selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Reply to Zhang and Xu: Environment is indeed important in any phenotypic study.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Fly wing evolution explained by a neutral model with mutational pleiotropy.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2020Article
- Morphological Phylogenetics Evaluated Using Novel Evolutionary Simulations.Systematic biology · 2020Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Although evolution by natural selection is widely regarded as the most important principle of biology, it is unknown whether phenotypic variations within and between species are mostly adaptive or neutral due to the lack of relevant studies of large, unbiased samples of phenotypic traits. Here, we examine 210 yeast morphological traits chosen because of experimental feasibility irrespective of their potential adaptive values. Our analysis is based on the premise that, under neutrality, the rate of phenotypic evolution measured in the unit of mutational size declines as the trait becomes more important to fitness, analogous to the neutral paradigm that functional genes evolve more slowly than functionless pseudogenes. However, we find faster evolution of more important morphological traits within and between species, rejecting the neutral hypothesis. By contrast, an analysis of 3,466 gene expression traits fails to refute neutrality. Thus, at least in yeast, morphological evolution appears largely adaptive, but the same may not apply to other classes of phenotypes. Our neutrality test is applicable to other species, especially genetic model organisms, for which estimations of mutational size and trait importance are relatively straightforward.
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