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sexual selection
Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Wed, 13 Apr 1994 12:44:00 PDT
A brief (and most likely insufficient reply to Langdon's question about
sexual selection.
There does not appear to be a single, absolute strategy that maximizes
individual fitness for both females and males. The implication is that
whatever strategy is worked out by primate group X, it will be contextually
dependent and relate to a variety of factors such as: resource distribution,
group dymanics, spatial distributions, seasonality and other time dependent
processes, predation, etc. etc. Further, one can, in principle, expect
solutions that range from sexual selection driven largely by male behavior to
sexual selection driven largely by female behavior and combinations in
between. I suspect that what seem to be mutually contradictory arguments are
likely the consequence of using different assumptions that often are not
clearly stated.
D. Read
READ@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU
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