Back then DNA analysis wasn't available, so he couldn't link offspring with specific parents in that way. His goal was to count up the number of mates that males had, versus females. CHOOSY OR CHOOSEY FREEIn 1948, Bateman created isolated fruitfly populations and allowed free mating to occur within each. Then along came Gowaty's team to take on the Bateman experiment itself. As recently as 2009, though, scientists were still at work overturning the idea that Bateman's findings apply universally to humans. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy's 1981 book The Woman That Never Evolvedpounded away, with careful field data, at the inaccuracy and sexism of assumptions about coy or passive primate females. It's not that these Bateman-powered expectations have gone completely uncontested. We've all heard it, right? When some big-name male public figure sleeps around, and cheats on his wife, isn't there always someone ready with an evolutionary explanation about vigorous male seed-sowing? In my own field of primate behavior, for instance, field researchers expected to see (and thus often did) male primates with highly active sex lives and females who were coy, verging on sexual passivity.Īnd don't think that humans were left out of this picture. After biologist Robert Trivers cited it in a key 1972 paper on parental investment, the "Bateman principle" turned up everywhere. His findings - promiscuous males, choosy females - seemed to strike a cultural chord. They conclude something startling: Bateman blew it.īefore I explain where they say Bateman went wrong, I need to show how Bateman's conclusions rippled far beyond the scholarly world of fruitfly sex. Now, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Patricia Gowaty and her colleagues Yong-Kyu Kim and Wyatt Anderson have repeated that study. Male reproductive success, in other words, correlated positively with number of mates, but female reproductive success did not. Bateman showed that the male insects' strategy was to mate with many females, whereas the females' strategy was to be discriminating in their choice of partners. The study, on fruitfly mating, was done in 1948 by geneticist A.J. Of the 100 "top science stories for 2012" chosen by Discover Magazine, I am most fascinated by #42: "The Myth of Choosy Women, Promiscuous Men." It reports a serious challenge to an experiment that has remained a touchstone in evolutionary biology for over 50 years. A male fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)
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