The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller Page A
Authors: Geoffrey Miller
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Lande and Mark Kirkpatrick showed that Fisher's runaway process could indeed work. The genes underlying female choice really could get swept up in a positive-feedback loop with the genes underlying male sexual ornaments. Species could even split apart into new species entirely as a result of diverging sexual preferences. Critics attacked these runaway models, leading to the kind of rapid revision and rethinking that marks the most productive epochs of science.
Evolutionary controversies attract experimental biologists. For most of the 20th century, the experimental techniques existed for testing Darwin's basic idea that females choose their mates for their ornamentation. Experimental psychology had developed sophisticated methods and statistical tests for investigating how
people make choices. These could have easily been applied to animals. But the work was not done, because biologists thought that sexual selection had been dismissed by the leading theorists. Once the theorists revived the ideas of fitness indicators and runaway processes, the experimenters took a fresh look at mate choice. In species after species, females were seen to show preferences for one male over another, for beautiful ornaments over bedraggled ones, for a higher level of fitness over a lower. Female choice was observed by Linda Partridge in fruit flies, by Malte Andersson in widowbirds, and by Michael Ryan in Tungara frogs. David Buss even showed evidence of mate choice in humans. Wherever males had sexual ornaments, females seemed to show sexual choice, just as Darwin predicted.
Sexual Selection Triumphant
Within a few years, sexual selection became the hottest area of evolutionary biology and animal behavior research. Before this revival, sexual selection was caught in a double bind. Nobody did experiments on mate choice because theorists doubted its existence. And nobody did theoretical work on sexual selection because there was no experimental evidence for mate choice. Once this vicious circle was broken by John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Amotz Zahavi, Robert Trivers, and other pioneers, Darwin's favorite idea was free to succeed.
Sexual selection's revival has been swift, dramatic, and unique. It may be the only major scientific theory to have become accepted after a century of condemnation, neglect, and misinter-
pretation. Throughout the 1990s, sexual selection research became one of the most successful and exciting areas of biology,
dominating the leading evolution journals and animal behavior
conferences. Helena Cronin's The Ant and the Peacock put sexual selection in its historical context, reminding biologists where it
came from and where it might go, Malte Andersson's 1994 textbook Sexual Selection reviewed the state of the art for a new generation of scientists. Sexual selection became the most fruitful idea in the emerging science of evolutionary psychology. After a
hundred years of neglect, The Descent of Man was once more being read—and not just for what it has to say on human evolution.
What Sexual Selection's Exile Costs the Human Sciences
Sexual selection's century of exile from biology had substantial costs for other sciences. Anthropologists paid little attention to human mate choice in the tribal peoples they studied for most of this century. By the time mate choice was accepted as an important evolutionary factor, most of those tribal peoples had been exterminated or assimilated. Psychologists had little evolutionary insight into human sexuality and their discipline was dominated for decades by Freudianism. Almost all of 20th-century psychology developed without considering the possibility that sexual selection through mate choice might have played a role in the evolution of human behavior, the human mind, human culture, or human society Following Marx, the social sciences saw a culture's mode of production as more important than its mode of reproduction. Economists had no explanation for the importance of "positional
Evolutionary controversies attract experimental biologists. For most of the 20th century, the experimental techniques existed for testing Darwin's basic idea that females choose their mates for their ornamentation. Experimental psychology had developed sophisticated methods and statistical tests for investigating how
people make choices. These could have easily been applied to animals. But the work was not done, because biologists thought that sexual selection had been dismissed by the leading theorists. Once the theorists revived the ideas of fitness indicators and runaway processes, the experimenters took a fresh look at mate choice. In species after species, females were seen to show preferences for one male over another, for beautiful ornaments over bedraggled ones, for a higher level of fitness over a lower. Female choice was observed by Linda Partridge in fruit flies, by Malte Andersson in widowbirds, and by Michael Ryan in Tungara frogs. David Buss even showed evidence of mate choice in humans. Wherever males had sexual ornaments, females seemed to show sexual choice, just as Darwin predicted.
Sexual Selection Triumphant
Within a few years, sexual selection became the hottest area of evolutionary biology and animal behavior research. Before this revival, sexual selection was caught in a double bind. Nobody did experiments on mate choice because theorists doubted its existence. And nobody did theoretical work on sexual selection because there was no experimental evidence for mate choice. Once this vicious circle was broken by John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Amotz Zahavi, Robert Trivers, and other pioneers, Darwin's favorite idea was free to succeed.
Sexual selection's revival has been swift, dramatic, and unique. It may be the only major scientific theory to have become accepted after a century of condemnation, neglect, and misinter-
pretation. Throughout the 1990s, sexual selection research became one of the most successful and exciting areas of biology,
dominating the leading evolution journals and animal behavior
conferences. Helena Cronin's The Ant and the Peacock put sexual selection in its historical context, reminding biologists where it
came from and where it might go, Malte Andersson's 1994 textbook Sexual Selection reviewed the state of the art for a new generation of scientists. Sexual selection became the most fruitful idea in the emerging science of evolutionary psychology. After a
hundred years of neglect, The Descent of Man was once more being read—and not just for what it has to say on human evolution.
What Sexual Selection's Exile Costs the Human Sciences
Sexual selection's century of exile from biology had substantial costs for other sciences. Anthropologists paid little attention to human mate choice in the tribal peoples they studied for most of this century. By the time mate choice was accepted as an important evolutionary factor, most of those tribal peoples had been exterminated or assimilated. Psychologists had little evolutionary insight into human sexuality and their discipline was dominated for decades by Freudianism. Almost all of 20th-century psychology developed without considering the possibility that sexual selection through mate choice might have played a role in the evolution of human behavior, the human mind, human culture, or human society Following Marx, the social sciences saw a culture's mode of production as more important than its mode of reproduction. Economists had no explanation for the importance of "positional
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