Phenotypic selection in natural populations: what have we learned in 40 years?

In 1983, Russell Lande and Stevan Arnold published “The measurement of selection on correlated characters,” which became a highly influential citation classic in evolutionary biology. This paper stimulated a cottage industry of field studies of natural and sexual selection in nature and resulted in several large-scale meta-analyses, statistical developments and methods papers. The statistical tools in their paper contributed to a breakdown of the traditional dichotomy between ecological and evolutionary time scales and stimulated later developments such as “eco-evolutionary dynamics”. However, regression-based selection analyses also became criticized from philosophical, methodological and statistical viewpoints and stimulated some still ongoing debates about causality in evolutionary biology. Here I return to this landmark paper by Lande and Arnold, analyse the controversies and debates it gave rise to and discuss the past, present and future of selection analyses in natural populations. A remaining legacy of Lande and Arnold (1983) is that studies of selection and inheritance can fruitfully be decoupled and be studied separately, since selection acts on phenotypes regardless of their genetic basis, and hence selection and evolutionary responses to selection are distinct processes.  

Methods
Data are accumulated citation statistics over different years (1979–2022) for Lande and Arnold (1983) and Gould and Lewontin (1979) and the influences on various fields (ecology, evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, etc.). These data were obtained from a Web of Science (WoS) citation search in November 2022. Citation data for these two key articles are separated by year and by journal in which they appeared.