THE EVOLUTION OF COSTLY MATE PREFERENCES II. THE "HANDICAP" PRINCIPLE

Yoh Iwasa; Andrew Pomiankowski; Sean Nee

doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.1991.tb02646.x

THE EVOLUTION OF COSTLY MATE PREFERENCES II. THE "HANDICAP" PRINCIPLE

Evolution. 1991 Sep;45(6):1431-1442. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.1991.tb02646.x.

Authors

Yoh Iwasa¹, Andrew Pomiankowski², Sean Nee³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 812, JAPAN.
² ABRG, Department of Zoology, Oxford University, OX1 3PS, UK.
³ AFRC Unit of Ecology and Behaviour, Department of Zoology, Oxford University, OX1 3PS, UK.

PMID: 28563835
DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.1991.tb02646.x

Abstract

We use a general additive quantitative genetic model to study the evolution of costly female mate choice by the "handicap" principle. Two necessary conditions must be satisfied for costly preference to evolve. The conditions are (i) biased mutation pressure on viability and (ii) a direct relationship between the degree of expression of the male mating character and viability. These two conditions explain the success and failure of previous models of the "handicap" principle. Our model also applies to other sources of fitness variation like migration and host-parasite coevolution, which cause effects equivalent to biased mutation.

Keywords: Deleterious mutations; male choice; sexual characters; sexual selection; “handicap” principle.