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Mate Choice and Null Models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Karen Kovaka
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Abstract

Biologists have proposed a variety of explanations for extravagant sexual displays, and controversies over explanations define the history of sexual selection research. Recently, Richard Prum has defended Darwin’s idea that the evolution of sexual displays is driven by arbitrary and nonadaptive preferences of potential mates. Prum argues that this explanation should be the null model for sexual selection research. I show that if we adopted Prum’s proposal, the inferences we could be justified in making are more modest than he claims. I also discuss problems with estimating model parameters that at present prevent his proposal from being useful in practice.

Type
Biological Sciences and Medicine
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 87 , Issue 5: PSA 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II Symposia Papers , December 2020 , pp. 1096 - 1106
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Jonathan Birch, Tom Rowe, and an anonymous referee for their insightful comments on draft versions of this article.

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