Lots of people indulge in their irrational desires for meaningful explanations of our chaotic world, often in ways that are so mainstream that it never occurs to us to wonder about their validity. For example, an entire industry of business news provides continuous explanations of what’s going on in economic marketplaces when in all likelihood there is absolutely nothing special going on most of the time. Business news channels broadcast an endless stream of financial reports about “events” in global financial markets. They confidently explain that the Hang Seng Index is up, or the London FTSE is down, or Dow futures are unchanged because of the latest unemployment report, negotiated sovereign debt settlement, or quarterly profit reports. Of course, the null hypothesis is that market acti... (查看原文)
After years of struggling against Grafen’s abundant proof standard, I came to realize that the field of evolutionary biology had become like the financial market news reports. Evolutionary biologists have become convinced that a special kind of rhyme and reason—adaptive mate choice—must be happening everywhere and all the time. Why are they so convinced? When you examine it, it is mostly just a belief that the world must be that way. Remember, in rejecting Darwinian mate choice, Wallace asserted as a matter of principle that “natural selection acts perpetually and on an enormous scale.” The intellectual justification remains largely unchanged. (查看原文)
In birds, there are basically two mechanisms at work in the evolution of female sexual autonomy. In many waterfowl, for example, females have evolved physical defense mechanisms to lower the effectiveness of forced copulation. Females with mutations for vaginal morphologies that prevent forced fertilization will have sons who inherit genes for their father’s attractive traits. These females will therefore have greater reproductive success (that is, more grandchildren) because other females will be attracted to their sexy offspring. Or rather, they’ll have such success if they’re not grievously injured or killed.
Unfortunately, as we saw in chapter 5, the evolution of these elaborate vaginal morphologies has a big downside, because it has instigated a costly, ever-accelerating sexual arms ... (查看原文)
