Notes
Thanks to Angela Potochink for putting together a fascinating session at ISHPSSB 2009 and additionally to Roberta Millstein and Joan Roughgarden for continuing the conversation we began in Brisbane. Sarah Richardson provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
Some of her criticisms of sexual selection (e.g., the paradox of the lek) apply only to the “good genes” models, whereas others (e.g., lack of heritability of female choice in some species) apply more broadly.
This is itself a confusion; the opposite of “coy” in this context is “willing to mate”; a female could be quite willing to mate, even with a number of partners, while still being choosy.
In principle, other views of natural selection and sexual selection can be analyzed similarly.
Thanks to the Roughgarden Lab at Stanford University and the Griesemer/Millstein Lab at UC Davis for helpful discussion. Thanks are also owed to Erika Milam, Angela Potochnik, and Joan Roughgarden for an enjoyable session at ISHPSSB 2009.
Thanks to Joan Roughgarden, Roberta Millstein, Erika Milam, Erol Akçay, and Pria Iyer for helpful discussion and to Sarah Richardson for useful comments on an earlier draft.
I thank Angela Potochnik also for her initiative and vision in organizing the session devoted to The Genial Gene at the ISHPSSB 2009 conference in Brisbane, Australia, from which these papers have emerged, and Sarah Richardson for her helpful and perceptive review of this manuscript.
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Milam, E.L., Millstein, R.L., Potochnik, A. et al. Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection. Metascience 20, 253–277 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6