ABSTRACT
Mating depends on the behavior of potential mates. Scientists study animal mating behavior by watching what potential partners do before copulation, and after to evaluate the fitness consequences of a mating. Mating behavior is usually considered to be sex specific: females doing one thing and males another, but Darwin’s (1871) ideas about mating behavior argued for sexually egalitarian behavior: either or both sexes can be choosy about whom to mate and both sexes can be indiscriminate. Yet, modern theories of mating behavior declared that sex differences in anisogamy (sex differences in gamete sizes) (AT) (Parker et al. 1972) and parental investments in offspring (PI) (Trivers 1972) determined sex differences in courtship, mating behavior, and parental fitness, ideas challenged when it was mathematically proved that chance can explain sex differences in fitness (Sutherland 1985). That insight inspired Hubbell & Johnson (1987) to study how demographic stochasticity affects individual mating behavior. Twenty-first century skepticism then inspired hundreds of experimental, strong inference challenges to PI and AT predictions exposing common sex similarities in mate choice behavior. More recently the “switch point theorem” (Gowaty & Hubbell 2009) proved that stochastic demography affects mating irrespective of sex. Then its corollary, “the killing time hypothesis” explained why mates often hurt each other. Thus recent perspectives show that in mate choice there is nothing so like a female as a male and vice versa. New students of mating behavior will design experiments to challenge or support today’s novel perspectives thereby supporting the ongoing work of scientific exploration.
