The use of intentional language in biology is controversial. It has been commonly applied by researchers in behavioral ecology, who have not shied away from employing agential thinking or even anthropomorphisms, but has been rarer among researchers from more mechanistic corners of the discipline, such as population genetics. One research area where these traditions come into contact—and occasionally clash—is the study of genet...

In two papers published at about the same time almost thirty years ago, Frank (Evolution, 45, 1991a, 262) and Hurst and Pomiankowski (Genetics, 128, 1991, 841) independently suggested that divergence of meiotic drive systems—comprising genes that cheat meiosis and genes that suppress this cheating—might provide a general explanation for Haldane's rule and the large X‐effect in interspecific hybrids. Although at the time, the i...

Hybridization between recently diverged species, even if infrequent, can lead to the introgression of genes from one species into another. The rates of mitochondrial and nuclear introgression often differ, with some taxa showing biases for mitochondrial introgression and others for nuclear introgression. Several hypotheses exist to explain such biases, including adaptive introgression, sex differences in dispersal rates, sex‐s...