Milam, Erika Lorraine (Author)
Looking for a Few Good Males reveals the changing importance of human behavior as the object of ultimate study in evolutionary and behavioral studies of animals between 1915 and 1975. Although a seemingly straightforward theoretical concept in evolutionary biology, "female choice" of mating partners was developed and employed in very different ways by population geneticists, ethologists, and organismal biologists. In the first decades of the twentieth century, biologists investigated female choice in animals as models for understanding the evolution of complex mating behavior in humans. By the 1940s, the evolution of human behavior largely disappeared as a reason motivating biologists to investigate the behavior of animals. As part of the neo-Darwinian research program known as the modern evolutionary synthesis, evolutionary biologists and population geneticists became interested in understanding the process of evolution in natural animal populations, rather than seeking to uncover the pattern of behavioral evolution in the animal kingdom. Concurrently, biologists interested in animal behavior shied away from anthropomorphic notions of choice as they strove to increase their professional standing. In the 1960s, as a reaction to the rising star of molecular biology, organismal biologists once again hoped to claim authority in understanding human social and sexual behavior through evolutionary theory. Despite the resistance with which social scientists received sociobiological theories applied to humans, sociobiology came to be the dominant paradigm within which biologists interested in sexual selection and female choice created the history of their discipline. The commensurate return to zoomorphism (the converse of anthropomorphism, or the tendency to read animal nature into human behavior) among organismal biologists studying the evolution of social and sexual behavior meant that, for them, the only relevant research from the preceding decades was that on individual animals; genetic and ethological research on female choice from the 1940s through the 1960s was not incorporated in what became the standard history of sexual selection. Thus, this dissertation not only uncovers lost mid-century research programs of female mate choice, it also explores the disciplinary stakes inherent in writing the history of sexual selection and female choice.
...MoreDescription “Reveals the changing importance of human behavior as the object of ultimate study in evolutionary and behavioral studies of animals.” Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/09 (2007). UMI pub. no. 3234794.
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