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Edward Bagnall Poulton's 1890 book, The Colours of Animals, renamed Wallace's concept of warning colours "aposematic" coloration, as well as supporting Darwin's then unpopular theories of natural selection and sexual selection. [18] Poulton's explanations of coloration are emphatically Darwinian. For example, on aposematic coloration he wrote that
Evidence for sexual selection Male argus pheasant (Argusianus argus) displaying to a female, from Richard Lydekker's Royal Natural History, 1895.[1]Poulton strongly supports Darwin both on the general theme of natural selection, and on the power of sexual selection in species which are sexually dimorphic (where, usually, the male is showier than the female):
To evolve, the mimicked species must have warning coloration, because appearing to be bitter-tasting or dangerous gives natural selection something to work on. Once a species has a slight, chance, resemblance to a warning coloured species, natural selection can drive its colours and patterns towards more perfect mimicry.
Darwin does not seem to have responded to this information, possibly because he thought natural selection would be a much slower process. [19] A scientific explanation of moth coloration was only published in 1896, 14 years after Darwin's death, when J. W. Tutt explicitly linked peppered moth melanism to natural selection. [16]
The development and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria provides evidence that evolution due to natural selection is an ongoing process in the natural world. Natural selection is ubiquitous in all research pertaining to evolution, taking note of the fact that all of the following examples in each section of the article document the process.
Coincident disruptive coloration is seen in other amphibians including the common frog, Rana temporaria, in which the dark and light bands that cross the body and hind legs coincide in the resting position, joining separate anatomical structures visually and breaking up and taking attention away from the body's actual outlines.
As a natural history narrative on what has become an intensely researched experimental subject, [9] Adaptive Coloration could be thought obsolete, but instead, Peter Forbes observes "But Cott's book is still valuable today for its enormous range, for its passionate exposition of the theories of mimicry and camouflage". [7]
The maintenance of the ancestral flower color in the allopatric population is favored weakly by selection, where the derived color in the sympatric population is being driven by strong selection. [56] Similarly, in P. pilosa and P. glaberrima, character displacement of petal color has been driven by selection, aided by pollen discrimination. [57]