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Gentle sex? Females just as feisty as males over reproduction

Males compete for sex, females choose – ever since Darwin, we've assumed that's how nature works. Time for a rethink?

By Tim Vernimmen

24 June 2015

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Damsels in control (Image: Richard Wilkinson

AFTER publishing On the Origin of Species, Darwin was worried. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” he confessed in a letter to a colleague. His theory of natural selection, he realised, couldn’t explain why the males of some species have evolved such preposterous ornaments or why others have elaborate armoury. He needed another idea.

And so the theory of sexual selection was born. Males have weapons, Darwin proposed, to fight over females, and their bright colours, fancy songs and adornments were to seduce the reticent sex into mating. “The female, on the other hand, with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male,” he wrote. “She is coy, and may often be seen endeavouring for a long time to escape from the male.”

89% Animal populations with polyandry”

Many of Darwin’s ideas caused great controversy among his Victorian contemporaries. But his ideas about sexual selection raised few eyebrows. The image of vigorous males competing for aloof, disinterested females fit the mindset of the time – at least that of men. Women’s opinions were rarely heard; few attended universities, let alone formal scientific meetings. But one did make a stand. Darwin’s French translator, Clémence Royer, noted that woman is “the one animal in all creation about which man knows the least”. She also complained that science had been “exclusively made by men” and had “considered woman too often an absolutely passive being, without instincts or passions, or her own interests”.

Times have changed, but sexual selection…

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