"Almost nothing is known from hybridization studies about the inheritance of courtship behavior of females, or of their responsiveness to particular male signals"
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Science likes to pretend it’s a clean chain of causes, but Grant is pointing at a conspicuous missing link: the female side of sexual selection. The line is blunt on purpose. “Almost nothing is known” isn’t coy modesty; it’s a corrective to a literature that, for decades, treated male display as the main event and female choice as either background noise or a black box called “preference.”
The specificity matters. Grant doesn’t say we know little about courtship behavior in general; he narrows it to hybridization studies, the classic toolkit for teasing apart heredity by crossing populations or species. Those crosses have been powerful for mapping visible traits and even male signals, yet they stumble when the trait is a contingent behavior in females: context-dependent, hard to score, and easily warped by captivity, stress, or unfamiliar social cues. “Responsiveness to particular male signals” hints at a deeper methodological trap: you can inherit a preference, but you can also inherit the sensory machinery that makes a signal legible, or the neural thresholds that make it compelling. Hybridization can mix those components in messy ways that don’t read out as a simple Mendelian pattern.
Subtext: if we can’t track the genetics of female responsiveness, we’re missing half the mechanism by which species boundaries hold or dissolve. In the Grants’ evolutionary world (finches, song, mate choice), this ignorance isn’t academic; it’s the difference between explaining how new species arise and merely describing that they do. The quote functions as an agenda item: stop over-crediting male traits, and build experiments that treat female choice as a measurable, heritable driver rather than an afterthought.
The specificity matters. Grant doesn’t say we know little about courtship behavior in general; he narrows it to hybridization studies, the classic toolkit for teasing apart heredity by crossing populations or species. Those crosses have been powerful for mapping visible traits and even male signals, yet they stumble when the trait is a contingent behavior in females: context-dependent, hard to score, and easily warped by captivity, stress, or unfamiliar social cues. “Responsiveness to particular male signals” hints at a deeper methodological trap: you can inherit a preference, but you can also inherit the sensory machinery that makes a signal legible, or the neural thresholds that make it compelling. Hybridization can mix those components in messy ways that don’t read out as a simple Mendelian pattern.
Subtext: if we can’t track the genetics of female responsiveness, we’re missing half the mechanism by which species boundaries hold or dissolve. In the Grants’ evolutionary world (finches, song, mate choice), this ignorance isn’t academic; it’s the difference between explaining how new species arise and merely describing that they do. The quote functions as an agenda item: stop over-crediting male traits, and build experiments that treat female choice as a measurable, heritable driver rather than an afterthought.
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| Topic | Science |
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