Talk:Disruptive selection

Let me know thoughts. Natural selection is known to be one of the most important biological processes behind evolution. There are many variations of traits, and some cause greater or lesser reproductive success of the individual. Selection’s purpose is to promote certain alleles, traits, and individuals that have a higher chance to survive and reproduce in their specific environment. Since the environment has a carrying capacity, nature acts on this mode of selection on individuals to let only the most fit offspring survive and reproduce to their full potential. The more advantageous the trait is the more common it will become in the population. 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 often times lead to sympatric speciation through a phyletic gradualism mode of evolution. Disruptive selection can be caused or influenced by multiple factors and also have multiple outcomes, in addition to speciation. Individuals within the same environment can develop a preference for extremes of a trait, against the intermediate. Selection can act on having divergent body morphologies in accessing food, such as beak and dental structure. It is seen that often this is more prevalent in environments where there is not a wide clinal range of resources, causing heterozygote disadvantage or selection against the average. Niche partitioning allows for selection of differential patterns of resource usage, which can drive speciation. To the contrast, niche conservation pulls individuals toward ancestral ecological traits in an evolutionary tug-of-war. Also, nature tends to have a ‘jump on the band wagon’ perspective when something beneficial is found. This can lead to the opposite occurring with disruptive selection eventually selecting against the average; when everyone starts taking advantage of that resource it will become depleted and the extremes will be favored. Furthermore, gradualism is a more realistic view when looking at speciation as compared to punctuated equilibrium. Disruptive selection can initially rapidly intensify divergence; this is because it is only manipulating alleles that already exist. Often it is not creating new ones by mutation which takes a long time. Usually complete reproductive isolation does not occur until many generations, but behavioral or morphological differences separate the species from reproducing generally. Furthermore, generally hybrids have reduced fitness which promotes reproductive isolation.^[1]--Doherty.76 (talk) 14:28, 2 December 2014 (UTC)doherty.76

Please see the new topic I just added. 169.231.28.179 (talk) 18:40, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Does disruptive selection occur because of gradualism, a slow accumulation of changes over long periods of time; or from punctuated equilibrium, which is rapid bursts of change in small periods of time? Could it also be a combination of both? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doherty.76 (talk • contribs) 16:07, 1 October 2014 (UTC) --Doherty.76 (talk) 13:05, 13 October 2014 (UTC)Doherty.76

What is the meaning of the chart with disruptive, stabilizing and directional selection? What is represented in X and Y? Thanks if you can clarify... --Clementvidal (talk) 10:57, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Ugh. This gets bogged down with overlong rabbit examples and doesn't do a good job of clearly and concisely converying the information. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.152.167.168 (talk) 18:20, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

While the style guide allows for the first person pronoun "we" in a math sense, I don't see what it adds. The feeling that the article is talking to me is quite strange. I don't see why it could not simply say "take" instead of "let us take." OWiseWun (talk) 06:03, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

this was the most user friendly and possibly best Wikipedia article I have ever read so I don't agree that the 'us' etc should be removed

59.182.185.147 (talk) 14:01, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Do genotypes of rabbit fur average out like that in genotypes? eg AA = white, BB=Black, AB=Grey. Even so, this example makes it sound like AB alleles is an average of AA and BB, which is not the case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 155.97.14.81 (talk) 00:53, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

My understanding was that disruptive versus diversifying selection were different phenomena. Disruptive selection acts because there is negative selection for intermediate phenotypes, where as diversifying selection operates by way of positive selection for extreme phenotypes, such that assuming a continuous linear phenotype-space disruptive selection results in a bimodal distribution of phenotypes, whereas diversifying selection results is a unimodal distribution with an increasing standard deviation. Should diversifying selection be its own article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Taricha (talk • contribs) 18:28, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

See ongoing debate over the Neutral theory (Kimura, 1968), the nearly Neutral Theory (Tomoko Ohta 1973) and Natural Selection (Kern & Hahn 2018) regarding the main article statement "Natural selection is known to be one of the most important biological processes behind evolution [dubious – discuss]." Evolution is the change in allele frequency over generations, not necessarily adaptation. 169.231.28.179 (talk) 18:39, 5 May 2025 (UTC)