Kees Wanders, Guangji Chen, Shaohong Feng, Guojie Zhang, Tamás Székely, Mike Bruford, Zsolt Végvári, Götz Eichhorn, Araxi Urrutia
Good genes theories of sexual selection predict that polygamy will be associated with more efficient removal of deleterious alleles (purifying selection), due to the alignment of sexual selection with natural selection. On the other hand, runaway selection theories expect no such alignment of natural and sexual selection, and may instead predict less efficient purifying selection in polygamous species due to higher reproductive variance. In an analysis of polymorphism data extracted from 150-bird genome assemblies, we show that polygamous species carry significantly fewer nonsynonymous polymorphisms, relative to synonymous polymorphisms, than monogamous bird species (p = ...
December 8, 2022: Evolution; International Journal of Organic Evolution