Question

Explain an actual example of a specific trend in natural selection. Identify the name of the trend.

Answer 1

There are eight potential large-scale trends, including overall directional changes in entropy, energy intensiveness, evolutionary versatility, developmental depth, structural depth, adaptedness, size, and complexity. The changes involving increases in body size and morphological complexity are the most familiar. For example trends in horse evolution has increase in body size, reduction in number of toes, and increase in height of grinding teeth.

This is a Driven trend. Strong selection for a newly acquired trait. Driven trends has following properties -
Confining boundary, increases more likely than decreases (implies selection for large size).