When I was talking to Matt Hahn I made a pretty stupid semantic flub, confusing “soft selection” with “soft sweeps.” Matt pointed out that soft/hard selection were terms more appropriate to quantitative genetics rather than population genomics. His viewpoint is defensible, though going back into the literature on soft/selection, e.g., Soft and hard selection revisited, the main thinkers pushing the idea were population geneticists who were also considering ecological questions.*
The strange thing is that I had already known the definitions of hard and soft selection on some level because I had read about them as I was getting confused with hard and soft sweeps! But this was more than ten years ago now, and since then I haven’t given the matter enough thought obviously, as I defaulted back to confusing the two classes of terms, just as I used to.
Matt pointed out that truncation selection is a form of hard selection. All individuals below (or above) a certain phenotype value have a fitness of zero, as they don’t reproduce. In a single locus context, hard selection would involve deleterious lethal alleles, whose impact on the genotype was the same irrespective of ecological context. So in a hard selection, it operates by reducing the fitness of individuals/genotypes to zero.
For soft selection, context matters much more, and you would focus more on relative fitness differences across individuals/genotypes. Some definitions of soft vs. hard selection emphasize that in the former case fitness is defined relative to the local ecological patch, while the latter is a universal estimate. Soft selection does not necessarily operate through the zero fitness value for a genotype, but rather differential fitness. Hard selection can crash your population size. Soft selection does not necessarily do that.
Though I won’t outline the details, one of the originators of the soft/hard selection concept analogized them to density-dependent/independent dynamics in ecology. If you know the ecological models, the correspondence probably is obvious to you.
As for hard and soft sweeps, these are particular terms of relevance to genomics, because genome-wide data has allowed for their detection through the impact they have on the variation in the genome. A “sweep” is a strong selective event that tends to sweep away variation around the focus of selection. A hard sweep begins with a single mutant, and positive selection tends to drive it toward fixation.
A classical example is lactase persistence in Northern Europeans and Northwest South Asians (e.g., Punjabis). The mutation in the LCT gene is the same across a huge swath of Eurasia. And, the region around the genome is also the same, because regions of the genome adjacent to that single mutation increased in frequency as well (they “hitchhiked”). This produces a genetic block of highly reduced diversity since the hard selective sweep increases the frequency of so many variants which are associated with the advantageous one, and may drive to extinction most other competitive variants.
Someone is free to correct me in the comments, but it strikes me that many hard selective sweeps are driven by soft selection. Fitness differentials between those with the advantageous alleles and those without it are not so extreme, and obviously context dependent, even in cases of hard sweeps on a single locus.
The key to understanding soft sweeps is that there isn’t a focus on a singular mutation. Rather, selection can target multiple mutations, which may have the same genetic position, but be embedded within different original gene copies. In fact, soft selection often operates on standing variation, preexistent alleles which were segregating in the population at low frequencies or were totally neutral. Genetic signatures of these events are less striking than those for hard sweeps because there is far less diminishment of diversity, since it’s not the increase in the frequency of a singular mutation and the hitchhiking of its associated flanking genomic region.
Soft sweeps can clearly occur with soft selection. But truncation selection can occur on polygenic traits, so depending on the architecture of the trait (i.e., effect size distribution across the loci) one can imagine them associated with hard selection as well.
Going back to the conversation I had with Matt the reason semantics is important is that terms in population genetics are informationally rich, and lead you down a rabbit-hole of inferences. If population genetics is a toolkit for decomposing reality, then you need to have your tools well categorized and organized. On occasion it is important to rectify the names.
* There are two somewhat related definitions of soft/hard selection. I’ll follow Wallace’s original line here, though I’m not sure they differ that much.
I see a bunch of conflicting definitions of hard selection. But going with absolute/relative, LCT looks like hard selection to me: it gives an absolute increase in calories, rather than a relative advantage. Of course it requires context, namely dairy, but everything requires context.