ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Sexual selection predicts species richness across the animal kingdom.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effects of sexual selection on functional and molecular reproductive divergence during experimental evolution in seed beetles.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Sexual selection and speciation: a meta-analysis of comparative studies.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Up, Down, and All Around: Courtship Behavior Deviants and Genetic Divergence in the Reef-Dwelling Bioluminescent Ostracod,Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Synthesis and Scope of the Role of Postmating Prezygotic Isolation in Speciation.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2024Review
- How Important Is Sexual Isolation to Speciation?Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2024Review
- Fossil evidence sheds light on sexual selection during the early evolution of birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Selection on the Fly: Short-Term Adaptation to an Altered Sexual Selection Regime in Drosophila pseudoobscura.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Mating system and speciation I: Accumulation of genetic incompatibilities in allopatry.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- Sexual selection leads to positive allometry but not sexual dimorphism in the expression of horn shape in the blue wildebeest, Connochaetes taurinus.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Concerted evolution of metabolic rate, economics of mating, ecology, and pace of life across seed beetles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Experimental evolution supports signatures of sexual selection in genomic divergence.Evolution letters · 2021Article
- Three-dimensional geometric morphometric analysis of the skull ofProceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Machine learning approaches identify male body size as the most accurate predictor of species richness.BMC biology · 2020Article
- Experimental evidence for effects of sexual selection on condition-dependent mutation rates.Nature ecology & evolution · 2020Article
- Dominance effects strengthen premating hybridization barriers between sympatric species of grasshoppers (Acrididae, Orthoptera).Journal of evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Sexual selection predicts the rate and direction of colour divergence in a large avian radiation.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Sexual selection, body mass and molecular evolution interact to predict diversification in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Sexual selection, phenotypic plasticity and female reproductive output.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our improving knowledge of the animal tree of life consistently demonstrates that some taxa diversify more rapidly than others, but what contributes to this variation remains poorly understood. An influential hypothesis proposes that selection arising from competition for mating partners plays a key role in promoting speciation. However, empirical evidence showing a link between proxies of this sexual selection and species richness is equivocal. Here, we collected standardized metrics of sexual selection for a broad range of animal taxa, and found that taxonomic families characterized by stronger sexual selection on males show relatively higher species richness. Thus, our data support the hypothesis that sexual selection elevates species richness. This could occur either by promoting speciation and/or by protecting species against extinction.
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