In finite populations, an allele disappears or reaches fixation due to two main forces, selection and drift. Selection is generally thought to accelerate the process: a selected mutation will reach fixation faster than a neutral one, and a disadvantageous one will quickly disappear from the population. We show that even in simple diploid populations, this is often not true. Dominance and recessivity unexpectedly slow down the evolutionary process for weakly selected alleles. In particular, slightly advantageous dominant and mildly deleterious recessive mutations reach fixation slightly more slowly than neutral ones (at most 5%). This phenomenon determines genetic signatures opposite to those expected under strong selection, such as increased instead of decreased genetic diversity around the selected site. Furthermore, we characterize a new phenomenon: mildly deleterious recessive alleles, thought to represent a wide fraction of newly arising mutations, on average survive in a population slightly longer than neutral ones, before getting lost. Consequently, these mutations are on average slightly older than neutral ones, in contrast with previous expectations. Furthermore, they slightly increase the amount of weakly deleterious polymorphisms, as a consequence of the longer unconditional sojourn times compared to neutral mutations.KEYWORDS weak selection; diffusion approximation; dominance; recessive mutations A new allele emerging in a finite population usually has two possible fates-extinction or fixation. Selection affects the probability with which these occur and how long it will take. Thus, an advantageous allele has an increased chance to fix, due to positive selection, while a deleterious mutation has an increased chance of extinction. In both cases, the time until fixation and extinction is commonly thought to decrease with the strength of selection (Kimura and Ohta 1969b;van Herwaarden and Van Der Wal 2002). Kimura and Ohta (1969a,b) and Ewens (2004) applied diffusion theory to model finite populations, obtaining keystone approximations for the neutral case, in the absence of selection, or when selection is fairly strong. Recently it has been pointed out that in haploid models, in the presence of frequency-dependent fitness, the time to fixation of a positively selected allele can increase with the strength of selection (Altrock et al. 2010(Altrock et al. , 2012. In diploids, a newly arising mutation is usually expected to have a time to fixation longer than that of a neutral one in the case of overdominance, when the heterozygote has an higher fitness than the two homozygotes-a case usually referred to as heterozygote advantage or more generally balancing selection (Key et al. 2014). In the case of overdominance, both alleles would be maintained in an infinite population. In this article we unify these results, showing that in diploids, certain classes of mutations behave as slow sweeps/selective strolls: the time to fixation of a positively selected allele A can be slightly longer than in the...