Dissertation Research: Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology, 1900-1975

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This Science and Technology Studies Doctoral Improvement Grant investigates how the choice of research organisms, experimental practices, and theoretical approaches across disciplines of biology shaped the values and meanings ascribed to female choice. The resulting narrative offers a window into the different but overlapping material and theoretical cultures of evolutionary biology in the twentieth century. The history of female choice in the published literature has been restricted to field-based narratives of the history of sexual selection. According to these narratives, sexual selection enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the late nineteenth-century (mostly among the general public), and then disappeared until the 1970s, when it was rediscovered. The cause of this "eclipse" is laid at the feet of female choice; anthropomorphic notions of choice inhibited the widespread acceptance of sexual selection until the late 1960s, commensurate with the rise of second-wave feminism and increasing acceptance of the idea that a female could actively "choose." However, the history of female choice in the decades preceding 1970 is far more complex than the eclipse narrative implies. This history is not found in the field studies of sexual difference emphasized by the standard narrative of sexual selection, but in experimental laboratories investigating mate-choice behavior. The tendency of historians and biologists to distinguish so strongly between the laboratory and the field, combined with the focus on field-based investigations in the history of sexual selection, has obscured the breadth of interest in female choice across biological disciplines and the nodes of communication and contestation among them. Despite differences in approach to female choice, a traffic of ideas and practices did exist across the fields of population genetics, ethology, and organismal-based sciences like ichthyology and ornithology. In the United States, Theodosius Dobzhansky provided one focal point for these interactions, and in Britain, Nikolaas Tinbergen provided another. Ichthyologists and drosophilists were involved in separate international communities, both of which included communication across disciplinary boundaries. Additionally, disciplinary divisions in different countries between biologists interested in animal behavior and population genetics varied considerably. By asking what "female choice meant to different research programs, this dissertation will bring these important points of communication and contestation into full view, illuminating the unities and disunities of biology in the twentieth century across organismal divides, disciplinary rifts, and vast oceans.