Plants and Animals

What Happens when Natural and Sexual Selection Collide?

What Happens when Natural and Sexual Selection Collide?

Charles Darwin famously discovered evolution through natural selection, but noted that it played a role in referring not only to biological change, but also to sexual selection. Other scientists have added more subtle or unusual reasons. Sometimes natural and sexual selection seems to be pushing in the opposite direction but experimentally this arousal has been relatively denied. Sexual selection occurs when one species has a preference for the other’s specific traits in one sex, even if they do not properly enhance survival. In the final case such as peacock tails can be a big inconvenience when confronted by predators, unless people decide on their choice and protection.

More generally, sexual selection takes on useful properties for other purposes such as antlers – first applied to fight predators, but also for joint compounds. In a study published in Nature Communications, University of Exeter professor David Hosken studied how natural and sexual selection interacted using wide-horned flour beetles. The shorter lifespan of the beetle compared to the spine allowed for studies for many generations. It is also easy to get moral approval.

Like many mammals, male beetles have developed large arms, mandatory in their case, with which to fight for access to females – an example of sexual selection. Like Pecora, male beetles had to develop larger heads and thicker necks to support their strong mouthpieces. Females, meanwhile, have a larger abdomen that allows them to carry more eggs. Hosken added deadly bugs to this environment. Bugs often eat men with the greatest spiritual males, perhaps they could not escape quickly, but showed no preference among the girls. Natural selection, in this case, goes against sexual selection.

After repeating the process for eight generations, Hosken compared the surviving beetle to a control group protected from predators. She reports that women in the projected population produce 20 percent more offspring in their lifetime. This finding is not surprising, given the past evidence that the number of daughters of older-convicted men is lower. Nevertheless, this type of interplay is one of the first to be read experimentally. Hosken said in a statement, “Each species of male and female shares genes, but in some cases – including broad horned flour bits – good genes for one sex are not always ideal for another.”