Comments on: Why do female seed beetles prefer the sperm of inferior males?

By: Aldebrn

Aldebrn — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:58:42 +0000

Another long shot: can we be sure these observations don’t result from sampling a non-ergodic random process? That is, the a priori measure of quality as the number of sires in one trial may be the partial source of the subsequent observations’ puzzlement. Maybe if the entire experiment was repeated several more times (running the non-ergodic process multiple times), a different picture may emerge?
This is a fairly subtle aspect of statistics but with incredible importance for biological studies. The best introduction to this effect and the weird results it causes is also the funniest, called “Irreproducible results and the breeding of pigs, or nondegenerate limit random variables in biology”: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=16289735644995248770 (freely available online). I’ll take a look at the paper and see if the study excluded these effects, but I’d be glad of your opinion too.

By: Lobster

Lobster — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:58:36 +0000

Would it be unreasonable to expect healthier, higher-quality male beetles to have a larger, spikier penis? Sometimes the female is actually injured or killed by an overzealous suitor; maybe this adaptation decreases the chances her daughters will be stabbed to death.

By: AwesomeRobot

AwesomeRobot — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:15:30 +0000

What if the large percentage of less-healthy children is somehow an advantage for the minority of healthier children? E.g. in the wild the less healthy children are eaten by predators and the more healthy children can escape while they’re being eaten.
It’s a long-shot.