Despite male resource based contributions to offspring, selection on males may not have been strong enough for them to detect more subtle individual variations in attractiveness, as opposed to more obvious features such as facial neoteny, averageness and symmetry.
An offspring selection operator is used to introduce self adaptive selection pressure (Affenzeller and Wagner, 2005).
The strength of the association between secondary sexual characters and offspring survival suggests that viability selection may render small but significant increases in fitness [9], but some studies suggest otherwise (e.g., [10]), and the subject of indirect selection on female mate choice or mating behaviour remains a contentious issue in the study of sexual selection [11].
The helping traits are preserved and proliferate through relatives, not direct offspring: kin selection.
Hop production and breeding requires large plot sizes for individual genotypes and this fact alone has precluded breeders from observing large numbers of individuals or offspring for selection purposes.
Parasites can also be transmitted to host offspring, and selection should favour maternal responses that extend protection against parasites to eggs, embryos or chicks [1].
Compared to analyses of the complete dataset (including replicates with <7 diploid offspring), data selection does not influence our conclusions.
He demonstrated that between two alleles that on average produce the same number of offspring, natural selection favors the allele that produces offspring with lesser variance when the breeding adults of the next generation are sampled from a finite pool of offspring.
While selfing has obvious benefits in terms of genetic contribution to offspring (automatic selection; Fisher 1941), and reproductive assurance when outcross pollen is limited (e.g. Kalisz and Vogler 2003, see Busch and Delph 2012 for a review of both hypotheses), there are also several costs associated with selfing.
The highest heritability recorded for the parameters photosynthetic rate, transpiration rate, and number of filled grains/panicle and yields/plant demonstrates that these traits could be successfully transferred to offspring, if selection for these characters is performed in the hybridisation programme.
If a behavior or characteristic does not prevent an organism from producing offspring, natural selection may not act strongly enough upon it to remove it from the population with the speed at which favorable characteristics spread throughout the population.
