Bigger Is Fitter? Quantitative Genetic Decomposition of Selection Reveals an Adaptive Evolutionary Decline of Body Mass in a Wild Rodent Population
Given the rapid anthropogenic environmental changes experienced by organisms around the world, there is an increasing need for an ability to understand and predict the evolutionary dynamics of wild populations [1, 2]. Despite good empirical examples of the adaptive evolution of traits with a simple genetic architecture [3–5], the picture is very different for quantitative traits, which in most cases are a function of many genes of small effect [6].
