Evolutionary lability of sexual selection and its implications for speciation and macroevolution

Sexual selection is widely hypothesized to facilitate speciation and phenotypic evolution, but evidence from comparative studies has been mixed. Many previous studies have relied on proxy variables to quantify the intensity of sexual selection, raising the possibility that inconclusive results may reflect, in part, the imperfect measurement of this evolutionary process. Here, we test the relationship between phylogenetic speciation rates and indices of the opportunity for sexual selection drawn from populations of 82 vertebrate taxa. These indices provide a much more direct assessment of sexual selection intensity than proxy traits and allow straightforward comparisons among distantly related clades. We find no correlation between the opportunity for sexual selection and speciation rate, and this result is consistent across many complementary analyses. In addition, widely used proxy variables – sexual dimorphism and dichromatism – are not correlated with indices employed here. Moreover,..., Meta-analytic procedure used for data collection Estimates of the opportunity for sexual selection and Bateman gradients were obtained after an extensive search in the literature that follows meta-analytic procedures (see more details in Macedo-Rego et al 2024. While screening the literature, studies were selected whether they provided at least one estimate of φIs or φIf and one estimate of φI for a given sex (see main text). The search was performed in two databases: ISI Web of Science (all databases) and Scopus, and its step-by-step PRISMA design (see Nakagawa et al, 2017) is illustrated in Supplementary figure 2. The following keywords were used:\"reproductive success\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"fitness\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"paternity\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"offspring\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"litter\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"fertilization success\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"breeding success\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"fecundity\" AND \"mating success\" OR \"reproductive rate\" AND \"matin..., , # Data from: Evolutionary lability of sexual selection and its implications for speciation and macroevolution [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0p2ngf277](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0p2ngf277) This folder contains the dataset & analytical scripts of the manuscript entitled \"Evolutionary lability of sexual selection and its implications for speciation and macroevolution\". ## Authors & institutions: Matheus Januario[a] Renato C. Macedo-Rego[b,c], Daniel L. Rabosky[a] Author affiliations: a. Museum of Zoology & Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, 2032 Biological Sciences Building, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, (USA) b. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, 321, Travessa 14, São Paulo, SP, 05508-090 (Brazil) c. Departamento de Biologia Geral, Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Av. Peter Henry Rolfs s/n, Viçosa, MG, 36570-000 (Brazil) ## Description of the data and file structure Responsible for collecti...