Stabilizing section is a form of natural selection in which extreme traits are selected against. For instance, in a cold snap in New England, sparrows that are either too large or too small might be unable to survive the extreme weather for various reasons., Bbut average-sized sparrows, who don’t have any “extreme” traits, might survive better than their counterparts at the opposite ends of the spectrum.
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Stabilizing Selection Term Timeline in The Beak of the Finch
The timeline below shows where the term Stabilizing Selection appears in The Beak of the Finch. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7: Twenty-five Thousand Darwins
...Mandarte sparrows were much harder to observe than those in the Galápagos finches, because “ stabilizing selection ”—a force that seeks to make all of the sparrows the same—is working on them.
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Chapter 16: The Gigantic Experiment
...lab, and studied them—he determined that the sparrows had been through what’s called a “ stabilizing selection ” event, because there were simply too many of them. The ones less equipped to...
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