Abstract
The history of evolutionary biology illustrates how theory shapes what we see and don't see in nature. Over the past 30 years, theoretical reappraisals in two areas of evolutionary research—sexual coevolution and the sex roles—have challenged longstanding ideas and yielded rich harvests of startling observations. This process continues apace.
Highlights
Charles Darwin [1,2] handed us a picture of competition as a constructive process responsible for adaptation to the environment, as well as the evolution of striking sexual displays and weapons
Darwin believed that sexual competition promotes adaptation by helping to weed out poor-quality males from the breeding pool and bringing about assortative pairing between high-quality males and females
When the study of mating systems and sexual selection exploded in the second half of the 20th century, the ensuing flood of empirical evidence showed that female animals as diverse as birds, mammals, and insects choose among eager, indiscriminate males [5]
Summary
Beginning in the late 1970s, new ideas increasingly challenged both the view of sexual competition as facilitator of viabilityenhancing adaptation, and the ‘‘typical’’ sex roles defined by Darwin and Bateman. The most obvious form, called ‘‘interlocus sexual conflict,’’ occurs when the sexes employ different traits (controlled by different genetic loci) in a struggle over the outcome of an interaction, such as mating. This results in sexually antagonistic coevolution that can lead to a sexual ‘‘arms race’’ [7]. PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org expressing the male-benefit phenotype would out-compete males lacking that phenotype By harming their mates, such males may reduce females’ life expectancy and lifetime fecundity, and sexual conflict is predicted to be weak or absent in the case of true lifetime monogamy.
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