Patricia Gowaty, professor of ecology at UGA, delivered the spring semester Science for Humanists Lecture for the Center for Humanities and Arts on Feb. 28. She explained her recent work on the effects of mate choice on offspring viability. Some highlights:
“Individuals, male and female, are in contests over the control of reproduction, which affect the outcomes of offspring viability selection--a universal selection pressure organizing the behavior of parents. . . . The much more rapid evolutionary adaptation of pathogens has been used to explain the evolution of traits in sons, but these ideas . . . fail to take into account constraints on free expression of mate preferences by females. . . . The pathogenic challenge to parents predicts that ‘there is no best male that all females prefer,’ that what is optimal for one individual is unlikely to be optimal for another. . . .
“Does offspring viability depend on the free expression of mate preferences? . . . In both drosophila and mouse, offspring viability was significantly higher when either males or females were allowed to mate with their preferred mate. There was no significant difference between males and females; there was no significant difference in number of eggs laid. . . .
“Constraints on free expression of mate choice matter. . . . If constraints matter to flies, fish, mallards and mice, they probably matter to humans, too.”
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