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Mating Markets: A Naturally Selected Sex Allocation Theory of Sexual Selection

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Abstract

This article utilizes three premises. (1) There are commonly ecologically oriented, naturally selected specialized differences in frequency and/or quality as well as sexually selected differences between the sexes. (2) Sex in the sense of coming together and going apart (syngamy and meiosis in haploids) or going apart and coming together (meiosis and syngamy in diploids) is trade in these naturally selected differences, i.e., there is a mating market in sexual species. (3) While such trade is beneficial to the population as a whole, sexual competition and selection is conflict over the profits of that trade and can be detrimental to the population as a whole. These premises yield a naturally selected sex allocation theory of the possible directions and forms of sexual selection, i.e., one that includes costs as well as frequencies. This can explain conventional sex roles, the sex-role reversed, inter- as well as intrasexual selection, and passive as well as active choice. Any of these alternatives may be over mates, over gametes, or both. A hypothetical example based on density dependence relative to resources is provided, one that suggests that centrioles may be a cytoplasmic resource in males in multicellular animals, and which are the target of active choice and the mechanism of manipulation in passive female choice. As a whole, the approach yields a truly general theory of sexual selection, provides an alternative to the mechanism for Fisher’s principle, and gives a theoretical explanation for Mayr’s biological species definition.

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Notes

  1. Of course, all sexual competition and selection is “intra” in the sense that it involves competition among members of one sex (Brown 1983). However, that does not mean that the mechanism by which it works cannot be morphology, physiology, behavior, etc., directed towards members of the opposite sex, commonly called intersexual selection.

  2. Autophagy is associated with health span and life span including in mammals (Fernández et al. 2018).

  3. It would be helpful if for conflict between the sexes over the profits in mating markets we could turn to the economics of “transaction costs” (Coase 1937; Williamson 1995), usually said at a minimum to include market size, measurement, and enforcement costs. Unfortunately, however, classical microeconomics long ago defined “force, fraud, and breaches of trust” to be outside of its subject matter.

  4. For example, the subject index of Charnov’s classic monograph on sex allocation, The Theory of Sex Allocation (1982), contained only a single entry for sexual selection (three pages on higher plants). The situation had improved somewhat in the other direction by the early 1990s when Andersson’s classic monograph on sexual selection, Sexual Selection (1994), was published. It contained a five- and a six-page entry on sex allocation, but ones that came late in a 500-and-some-page book. But even more recently, perhaps one of the most widely used textbooks in evolutionary biology (Losos 2014), with eight sections divided into 107 chapters, includes three chapters on sexual selection, but no chapters on sex allocation (which rates only a single subentry in the index referring to a single page in the text). Along the same lines but not so extreme, a topic search conducted on Jan 16, 2018, of the Web of Science, which includes title, keywords, and abstracts, yielded 5074 entries for sex allocation and 27,719 entries for sexual selection but only 533 entries for the two combined.

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Acknowledgments

As always, the author would like to acknowledge Gail Greer as well as two referees.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Marion Blute

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  1. Marion Blute
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Correspondence to Marion Blute.

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Blute, M. Mating Markets: A Naturally Selected Sex Allocation Theory of Sexual Selection. Biol Theory 14, 103–111 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-019-00315-9

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