Soil heterogeneity is an important driver of divergent natural selection in plants. Neotropical forests have the highest tree diversity on earth, and frequently, soil specialist congeners are distributed parapatrically. While the role of edaphic heterogeneity in the origin and maintenance of tropical tree diversity is unknown, it has been posited that natural selection across the patchwork of s...

Many ecologically important traits have a complex genetic basis, with the potential for mutations at many different genes to shape the phenotype. Even so, studies of local adaptation in heterogeneous environments sometimes find that just a few quantitative trait loci (QTL) of large effect can explain a large percentage of observed differences between phenotypically divergent populations. As hig...

Genes under divergent selection flow less readily between populations than other loci. This observation has led to verbal "divergence hitchhiking" models of speciation in which decreased interpopulation gene flow surrounding loci under divergent selection can generate large regions of differentiation within the genome (genomic islands). The efficacy of this model in promoting speciation depends...

Ecological speciation is the evolution of reproductive isolation as a consequence of direct divergent natural selection or ecologically mediated divergent sexual selection. While the genomic signature of the former has been extensively studied in recent years, only few examples exist for genomic differentiation where environment-dependent sexual selection has played an important role. Here, we ...

We evaluated whether Batesian mimicry promotes early-stage reproductive isolation. Many Batesian mimics occur not only in sympatry with their model (as expected), but also in allopatry. As a consequence of local adaptation within both sympatry (where mimetic traits are favored) and allopatry (where nonmimetic traits are favored), divergent, predator-mediated natural selection should disfavor im...