Empirical evidence indicates that the distribution of the effects of mutations on quantitative traits is not symmetric about zero. Under stabilizing selection in infinite populations with normally distributed mutant effects having a nonzero mean, Waxman and Peck showed that the deviation of the population mean from the optimum is expected to be small. We show by simulation that genetic drift, leptokurtosis of mutational effects, and pleiotropy can increase the mean-optimum deviation greatly, however, and that the apparent directional selection thereby caused can be substantial.I N most models of the maintenance of genetic variance in quantitative traits by mutation-selection balance it is assumed, not least for mathematical simplicity, that the distribution of the effects of mutations on these traits is symmetric about zero (e.g., Bulmer 1980;Turelli 1984;Barton 1990;Keightley and Hill 1990;Zhang and Hill 2002). Mutation-accumulation experiments indicate, however, that mutations significantly affect average values of quantitative traits (Santiago et al. 1992;Lyman et al. 1996;Keightley and Ohnishi 1998;Lynch et al. 1998;Garcia-Dorado et al. 1999;Vassilieva and Lynch 1999;Ostrow et al. 2007; P. D. Keightley and D. L. Halligan, personal communication). For example, Garcia-Dorado et al. (1999) found that the mean effect of mutations on abdominal bristle number in Drosophila melanogaster is À0.24 environmental standard deviations.Recently, Waxman and Peck (2003) investigated a model in which this symmetry assumption was relaxed, i.e., a bias from zero in the mean of the distribution of mutational effects. They found that the deviation between the mean phenotypic value of the trait and the optimum (the mean-optimum deviation) is small. Similar estimates were previously obtained by Bü rger (2000; see p. 247, Equation 7.13). Both analyses were based on a number of other similar assumptions, however, which turn out to have an important influence on the mean-optimum deviation. In this note we consider some of these assumptions and focus on their impact on Waxman and Peck's (2003) conclusions.Waxman and Peck (2003) assumed a model in which the allelic effects of mutations at individual loci were normally distributed, but with a mean that departed from zero. Although they allowed differences among the parameters of the distribution of mutant effects at four different loci, in accordance with Welch and Waxman (2002), this generated overall distributions that did not deviate far from the normal (e.g., kurtosis $4 in the model for their Figure 3; cf. 3 for the normal). Furthermore, in Waxman and Peck's method of generating mutations, the mutants occurring most commonly have an effect equal to the bias. Empirical evidence shows, however, that the distribution of mutational effects on quantitative traits is leptokurtic, with most mutations having very small effects and a few having very large effects (Simmons and Crow 1977;Mackay et al. 1992;Caballero and Keightley 1994;Garcia-Dorado et al. 1999;Lynch et al. 1999; P. ...