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The peacock problem: does sexual selection really explain enough?

Article Excerpt
THE GENIAL GENE

Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness

By Joan Roughgarden

University of California Press

256 pp. | $24.95

Joan Roughgarden in The Genial Gene does not challenge Darwin s theory of evolution or its explanation for how species evolve mainly through natural selection. Instead she opposes "sexual selection," the standard explanation (frequently stated simply as fact, as in, the earth is round) for the mechanism through which natural selection works. Roughgarden points to an impressive catalog of biological studies of particular species that show, for the case under consideration, that the facts do not support the ideas of sexual selection. In her words, "Continuously widening sexual-selection theory converts it into a system that becomes increasingly hard to test and possibly easier to falsify, and so sexual selection slowly morphs from a scientific theory into a doctrine or ideology." She proposes that we discard sexual-selection theory, and she exhaustively details an alternative hypothesis--"social selection"--which, she insists, nevertheless falls firmly under the umbrella of evolutionary biology.

You don't have to be a scientist to know--in the year marking Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)--that natural selection is nature's breeding program. Creatures possessing characteristics best suited to survive and reproduce within their particular pond or wood will tend to pass these characteristics on to their offspring. Through the generations, genes mutate and environments change. Mutations that improve chances for survival and reproduction within the given environment tend to multiply through successive generations, whereas mutations that make survival and reproduction more difficult tend to die out along with the creatures that carry them. The tricky part is that the environment is locally in a state of flux (and sustains an occasional worldwide wallop, as in the extraterrestrial hit...

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