> Has science ever observed speciation via natural selection amongst a sexually reproducing cohort? Theories of speciation do seem to lean toward asexuality.

> Has science ever observed speciation via natural selection amongst a sexually reproducing cohort? Theories of speciation do seem to lean toward asexuality. I mean, at an extreme, we can consider asexual-reproduction through cloning -- where genetic-mutations simply get cloned along different lines, allowing for increasingly divergent genetics. But even when we're talking about sexual-reproduction, [theories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation#Modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation#Modes ) often focus on [bottlenecks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck ) (e.g., an isolated population on an island) -- which, while nominally "sexual" in the sense of individuals still engaging in sexual-reproduction, is asexual in the sense of the isolated-population disengaging from sexual-reproduction with other populations. Where, generally, greater population-level asexuality might be expected to lead to greater divergence -- with full-blown individual-level asexuality being an asymptotic-limit.