(v. i.) To renounce totally a religious belief once professed; to forsake one's church, the faith or principles once held, or the party to which one has previously adhered.
Example Sentences:
(1) Apostatic selection occurs when predators concentrate disproportionately on the common varieties of non-mimetic polymorphic prey species.
(2) When the prey density is very high, selection becomes 'anti-apostatic': predators preferentially remove rare prey.
(3) There is evidence that the apostatic selection was caused by some effect of the difficulty in detecting the prey when they were cryptic.
(4) Such frequency-dependent or 'apostatic' selection by predators hunting by sight could maintain polymorphism for colour pattern, and much of the supporting evidence for this idea has come from work on birds and artificial prey.
(5) The results showed that apostatic selection occurred when the prey were inconspicuous but not when they were conspicuous.
(6) The consistency of the replicated experiements gives strong reason to believe that apostatic selection is a widespread phenomenon among avian predators, and provides an explanation for many of the non-mimetic colour and pattern polymorphisms found among their prey.
Tergiversate
Definition:
(v. i.) To shift; to practice evasion; to use subterfuges; to shuffle.
Example Sentences:
(1) His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words."