Ecological interactions and the natural selection they cause play a prominent causal role in biological diversification and speciation. As a discipline, ecological genetics integrates the two components of adaptive evolution (natural selection and genetic variability) to study the mechanisms of evolution. Ecological genetics is a fruitful approach to the study of how reproductive isolation can evolve under natural selection. The essence of this way of thinking and the ways in which it can be

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... d to address persistent open questions in speciation are discussed.