Why do female animals select certain mates, and how do scientists
determine the answer? In considering these questions, Erika Lorraine
Milam explores the fascinating patterns of experiment and interpretation
that emerged as twentieth-century researchers studied sexual selection
and female choice. Approaching the topic from both biological and
animal-studies perspectives, Milam not only presents a broad history of
sexual selection-from Darwin to sociobiology-but also analyzes the
animal-human continuum from the perspectives of sex, evolution, and
behavior. She asks how social and cultural assumptions influence
human-animal research and wonders about the implications of gender on
scientific outcomes. Although female choice appears to be a
straightforward theoretical concept, the study of sexual selection has
been anything but simple. Scientists in the early twentieth century
investigated female choice in animals but did so with human social and
sexual behavior as their ultimate objective. By the 1940s, evolutionary
biologists and population geneticists shifted their focus, studying
instead how evolution affected natural animal populations. Two decades
later, organismal biologists once again redefined the investigation of
sexual selection as sociobiology came to dominate the discipline.
Outlining the ever-changing history of this field of study, Milam
uncovers lost mid-century research programs and finds that the
discipline did not languish in the decades between Darwin's theory of
sexual selection and sociobiology, as observers commonly believed.
Rather, population geneticists, ethologists, and organismal biologists
alike continued to investigate this important theory throughout the
twentieth century.
