ABSTRACT
Since 2004, Joan Roughgarden – a prominent evolutionary biologist – has boldly critiqued Darwin's theory of sexual selection as unable to adequately account for the diversity of morphology and sexuality in animals, using well-documented examples of phenomena such as same-sex sexuality across different species. Although her popular books have been well received by the public, her claims about sexual selection have been harshly criticized by her colleagues in evolutionary biology as “idiosyncratic”, “unusual”, “unorthodox” and representing only a “fringe viewpoint”. This chapter outlines the controversy surrounding her critique of sexual selection in order to interrogate the relation between stories and evidence in evolutionary biology. Using Isabelle Stengers’ concept of “materialism without eliminativism”, Kenney argues that the power of Roughgarden's scientific practice lies in her ability to actively work the relationship between story and evidence in the context of a political struggle for what kinds of animal bodies, behaviors and life histories are significant for evolutionary biology. The conclusion offers the speculative question “How many plots can the data hold?” as a provocation to embrace storytelling as an active part of scientific practice and to open up new pathways of narration, relation and investigation in evolutionary biology and beyond.
