Recently, while waiting in a waiting room, I noticed on a coffee table the Jan./Feb. 2013 “Year in Science” issue of “Discover” magazine, which included the “100 Top Stories of 2012.” (As you can see already, this isn’t exactly today’s news.)
Anyway… as I thumbed through it, a story jumped out at me. It was rated no. 42 in “The Year in Debunked Science” category. It seemed apropos to this forum, so here it is, verbatim.*
“The Myth of Choosey Women, Promiscuous Men”
by Fangfei Shen.
“It is one of the most familiar concepts from evolutionary biology: Natural selection makes males promiscuous and females choosey. But in June [2012], Patricia Gowaty of UCLA ******* a major flaw in the evidence supporting that idea.
“The Bateman principle, as it is known, assumes that males sire more offspring if they mate with more females, while females stick with a single mate because they are limited in how many young they can produce regardless of their hanky-panky.
“Geneticist A.J. Bateman seemingly proved it in a 1948 study of fruit fly mating, which has been regularly cited ever since.
“ ‘It has become more and more obvious that females in mice, birds, and all sorts of insects are mating with more than one male,’ Gowaty says, meaning that promiscuity cuts both ways.
“When she and her colleagues recently repeated the original study, they determined that Bateman’s methods skewed his results. Gowaty suggests that 60 years’ worth of researchers missed Bateman’s errors because they believed his conclusions so earnestly.
“ ‘We have been asleep at the wheel about a fundamental classic.’ New studies to test the concept are already underway.”
Comment: The point might also have been made — but wasn’t, seemingly — that scaling up the results of a study of fruit flies by many orders of magnitude then concluding the same results apply to humans is also a classic form of error, called “scaling error.”
There was no comment as to whether Ms. Patricia Gowaty and/or Ms. Fangfei Shen prefer cuckold husband / hotwife forms of marriage.
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* I asked one of the receptionists if it would be OK if I stole the magazine, since it was almost 2 years old but contained many interesting articles. She glanced around furtively, then said she guessed that would be OK.
Anyway… as I thumbed through it, a story jumped out at me. It was rated no. 42 in “The Year in Debunked Science” category. It seemed apropos to this forum, so here it is, verbatim.*
“The Myth of Choosey Women, Promiscuous Men”
by Fangfei Shen.
“It is one of the most familiar concepts from evolutionary biology: Natural selection makes males promiscuous and females choosey. But in June [2012], Patricia Gowaty of UCLA ******* a major flaw in the evidence supporting that idea.
“The Bateman principle, as it is known, assumes that males sire more offspring if they mate with more females, while females stick with a single mate because they are limited in how many young they can produce regardless of their hanky-panky.
“Geneticist A.J. Bateman seemingly proved it in a 1948 study of fruit fly mating, which has been regularly cited ever since.
“ ‘It has become more and more obvious that females in mice, birds, and all sorts of insects are mating with more than one male,’ Gowaty says, meaning that promiscuity cuts both ways.
“When she and her colleagues recently repeated the original study, they determined that Bateman’s methods skewed his results. Gowaty suggests that 60 years’ worth of researchers missed Bateman’s errors because they believed his conclusions so earnestly.
“ ‘We have been asleep at the wheel about a fundamental classic.’ New studies to test the concept are already underway.”
Comment: The point might also have been made — but wasn’t, seemingly — that scaling up the results of a study of fruit flies by many orders of magnitude then concluding the same results apply to humans is also a classic form of error, called “scaling error.”
There was no comment as to whether Ms. Patricia Gowaty and/or Ms. Fangfei Shen prefer cuckold husband / hotwife forms of marriage.
————————-
* I asked one of the receptionists if it would be OK if I stole the magazine, since it was almost 2 years old but contained many interesting articles. She glanced around furtively, then said she guessed that would be OK.
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