Highly favored ex

When the fitness of a trait is influenced by how common it is (i.e., its frequency) relative to different traits within a population, this is referred to as frequency-dependent selection. Frequency-dependent selection may occur between species or within a single species. This type of selection can either be positive—with more common phenotypes having higher fitness—or negative, with rarer phenotypes conferring increased fitness.

A heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, and the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

Social proof is a form of persuasion based on comparison and conformity. People compare their behavior and actions to what others are doing and will change to conform to do what their peers do.

An outlier is an observation of data that does not fit the rest of the data. It is sometimes called an extreme value. When you graph an outlier, it will appear not to fit the pattern of the graph. Some outliers are due to mistakes (for example, writing down 50 instead of 500), while others may indicate that something unusual is happening. Outliers are present far from the least squares line in the vertical direction. They have large "errors," where the "error" or residual is the...

Mate choice—the decision about whom to mate with—is a type of natural selection, since animals must reproduce to pass down their genes. Mate choice is also called intersexual selection because the behavior occurs between the sexes.

Gregor Mendel's work (1822 - 1884) was primarily focused on pea plants. Through his initial experiments, he determined that every gene in a diploid cell has two variants called alleles inherited from each parent. He suggested that amongst these two alleles, one allele is dominant in character and the other recessive. The combination of alleles determines the phenotype of a gene in an organism.