BRAINCAKEDisruptive Selection
Disruptive selection is natural selection that favours individuals at both extremes of the range and selects against individuals with intermediate phenotypes near the mean.
It happens when the environment offers two different conditions or resources, each best exploited by a different extreme phenotype, and intermediate individuals do less well with both.
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Key terms in this lesson
- speciation
- The formation of new species when populations become unable to interbreed to produce fertile offspring.
- bimodal
- Describes a frequency distribution with two separate peaks.
More in Gene Pools
- Different Sized Populations
- Isolation
- Selection Pressure
- Population Bottlenecks
- The Founder Effect
- Stabilising Selection
- Directional Selection
- Genetic Drift
All 16 lessons in Gene Pools · All Edexcel A-level Biology topics