BioConcepts

non-Darwinian selectionnicht-darwinsche Selektion (ger.)

• 1) Selection that is not based on differential mortality, but on differential reproduction.
  category selection

  1953

  Differential mortality may result in systematic differential reproduction. When it does, it is one sort of selection, but clearly not the only sort. That the concepts are different and that Darwinian selection is only one special case of, let us say, genetical selection is quite easy to see. Suppose that all the individuals in a population lived for precisely the same length of time, with no elimination of the unfit or survival of the fittest, hence no Darwinian selection. Suppose, further, that those among them systematically definable as, say, the taller ones, or those with an allele A, or a chromosome arrangement M, or a hereditary fondness for apples, had twice as many offspring as those without these characteristics. Then there would be very strong, clearly non-Darwinian selection and under its influence extremely rapid (although short-range) evolution of the population.

  Simpson, G.G. (1953). The Major Features of Evolution: 138.

• 2) Apostatic selection.
  category selection see also apostatic selection

  1954

  In a natural population of hosts and pathogens composed of many genotypes there will be selection for pathogens adapted to common biochemical types, and against those only adapted to rare ones. The selection among the host plants will be in the opposite direction. Thus both host and pathogen will constantly alter their prevailing genotype, in so far as it affects the host-parasite relation. The same is probably true of animals and their parasites. This process will favour a diversity of types in the lost, and probably in the pathogen also. It is, perhaps, too rapid and too reversible to be regarded as evolution, but it cannot be without effect on evolution, particularly by favouring divergence of separated populations. Haldane (1949b) has some further remarks on this topic. […] Non-Darwinian Selection. —The above is a particular case of what I venture to call non-Darwinian selection.

  Haldane, J.B.S. (1954). The statics of evolution. In: Huxley, J., Hardy, A.C. & Ford, E.B. (eds.). Evolution as a Process, 109-121: 115.