Sexual Selection

 differences in sex? Gender identity/expression?

 The Genderbread Person
 Why sex differences in behaviour?
o Are girls and boys brought up differently?
o Are there biological differences in behaviour?
 Natural Selection
o Genetic variation
o Selection pressure by environment
o Variation in number of surviving offspring
 Darwin (1859)
o Sexual selection depends on a struggle between the males for possession of
the females
o The result is not death of the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no
offspring – and therefore the death of those genes
 Why have sexes or sex?
o Asexual reproduction
 No mating costs
 All offspring reproduces
 Still some variation through asexual reproduction (mutations)
o Sexual reproduction
 Enhanced genetic variability
 Much higher variation and there is a choice on who you mate
with
 Rare genotypes sometimes do better
o Hamsters:
 Female eggs = large, few
 Male sperm = tiny, many
 Isogamy
o 2 sexes investing same amount
o Gametes of similar size
 Anisogamy
o One sex has invested more in gametes than others such as in humans where
female gametes and eggs are bigger and fewer than male gametes
o Eggs are costly to produce for females and so you have to be choosy about
mating whereas men have small gametes which are easy to produce so are
more focused on opportunity
 Female choice
 Male-male competition
 Females = rare expensive gametes
 Males = abundant cheap gametes
 Bateman’s Principle (1948)
o Where one sex invests considerably more than the other, members of the
latter will compete among themselves to mate with members of the former
  Males will either want to show off or have a way of physically out-
competing other males
 Showiness and weaponry in males
o Consequences for males
 Weapons
 Large body size
 Courtship behaviour
o Antler size in the Cervidae
 How do we know what the size is for?
 Can we make a link between variation in antler size and reproductive
success?
 Large males = bigger antlers
 If you take male of the same height – if antlers were larger they had
more females in their breeding group
 Bigger antlers = more females
o Body size in elephant seals
 Violent battles to find the dominant male who gets control of a harem
of females
 This can be the difference between 0 females and 20-30
females
 Less than 30% of males in a breeding season get to reproduce
so it is worth taking a high risk in the competition
 Elephant seals risk a lot to reproduce. They have a reproductive
strategy
 Slow and steady vs all out in one year and then never reproducing
again
 Red deer
 Males reproduce very little when years, have a couple great
years, and then it dies down very quickly which is different to
the females’ steady reproduction rate over their lifetime
 The role of colour
o Red enhances human performance in contests (Hill, R.A. & Barton, R.A.
(2005))
 Red sports teams performed better than blue teams
o Also true in online gaming (better to be red than blue in virtual comp: Ilie et
al. 2007)
o But: if an effect of male :male competition, shouldn’t it only be tur for men?
 Are females choosy? (Bateman 1948 ‘Intra-sexual selection in Drosophila’
o Contribution of males to next generation more variable
o Sex difference independent of environmental and heritable effects
o Intensity of male-male selection due to dependence on frequency of
insemination
 “undiscriminating eagerness in males and discriminating passivity in
females”
 What do females want?
o Runaway selection theory (Fisher)
 Trait driven beyond original function by preference
  A tail is an example. Natural selection would mean the tail is
optimised for flight. But with peacocks females like longer tails
which are not ideal with natural selection. It is harder for male
to fly BUT he will reproduce more easily
 Female choice pushes a longer tail length
 Trait does not indicate genetic ‘superiority’
 No advantage for survival, just down to female preference
 Daughters inherit preference, sons inherit trait
 Male peacocks:
 Many eye-spots/longer tails = more offspring
o Handicap theory (Zahavi)
 Traits are conspicuous and costly
 Longer tail = harder to fly so living is more costly. If you can
afford to pay the extra cost, it shows you are good at surviving
and are well adapted
 Only the ‘best’ males can afford to display them
 Females choose genetic quality of male, i.e. successful offspring
 Inter-sexual selection (Anderson, M. (1982), 299, 818-820
 Female tail length – we can tell what the optimal length is for
flight
 Heightened breeding success in males with modified, longer
tails
o Disease resistance (Hamilton & Zuk)
 Trait signals parasite load
 Trait indicates parasite resistance
 Females choose genetic quality i.e. healthy offspring
 NB At its foundation sexual selection is not about female choice
o It’s about choice depending on investment
o So… sexual selection can involve both male and female choice (where both
invest)
o Significant energy burden/cost that female primates are paying after the child
is born and in pregnancy
o In primates females also have showiness
 Sexual swellings
 What do males want?
o Baboon females with larger swellings
 Are preferred by males
 Receive more grooming from males
 Cause more aggression in males
 Reproduce at younger age
 Have larger number of surviving offspring per year
 Swellings advertise female quality
o Or do they? Again these were correlations…
o When we control for cycle number and conception,
effect reduces. Males may be tracking number of cycles
(for which swellings are a good signal?) (Fitzpatrick)
 What do males want?
o Female chimpanzees adjust their calling behaviour based on
 1. Reproductive status
 2. Level of females-female competition (Fallon BL et al., 2016)
o Female chimpanzees swellings
 Increase in size around ovulation
 Maximum size increases with each cycle with proximity to conception
 Males track individual swelling (prefer female at her maximum size,
rather than the biggest swelling in the group)
 Fathers can be unsure who fathered the offspring which can
increase investment from the group in the offspring
o What are you investing and how are you investing it?
 What do women want (human)?
o Preference towards masculinised faces?
o Menstrual cycle and face preference
 Penton-Voak I/S/ et al. (1999)
 Species preference
 Are preferences static or flexible?
 Wood W., et al. (2014)
 Gildersleeve, K., et al. (2014)
 Do facial traits correlate to anything real? (Stirrat, M. & Perrett, D.I. (2010)
o Increasing preference for masculinised faces, but also the levels of trust go
down the more masculinised a face is
o High testosterone around time of ovulation is valued but this might only be a
short term benefit
 What do males want? (Singh, D. (1993)) (Jasienska, G., et al. (2004))
o waist to hip ratio (1.7) supposed to reflect male’s preference
o preference for WHR 0.7 replicated across cultures in Europe, Asia and Africa
 but not in remote traditionalist societies
o Matsigenka (Amazonian Peru); Hadza (Tanzania) : preferred WHR = 0.9 (Yu,
D.W. & Shepard, G.H.
o Interaction between WHR and BMI – when given choice prefere low WHR
(0.7) but not at cost of low BMI
 Tsimane (Bolivian Amazon) (Sorokowski, P. et al., (2014))
 Male body size and reproductive success
o If you’re taller you’re slightly more likely to have had a child than if you’re
shorter, but this was not the case for men in their 50s (Pawlowski, B., et al.,
(2000)
 This was for Poland. The effect wasn’t for 50 year olds because of the
war so people were reproducing after the war and there were fewer
men around. This shows that environment can have effect on
reproductive tendencies
 Evolution of sexually selected traits
o Competition and mate choice -> Reproductive success -> trait ->
Competitions and mate choice
 Competition and choosiness depends on investment
  Females invest more across species and so there is more female
choosiness and more male:male competition
 Investment and trade-off
 What are the agents of selection?
o Natural selection
 Physical or biological environment
o Sexual selection
 Sexual rivals and mates