Dissertation Research: Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology, 1900-1975

这个科学和技术研究博士改进补助金调查研究生物，实验实践和理论方法的选择如何跨生物学学科塑造了赋予女性选择的价值和意义。 由此产生的叙述提供了一个窗口，进入不同的，但重叠的物质和理论文化的进化生物学在二十世纪。 在已发表的文献中，女性选择的历史仅限于基于场域的性选择历史叙述。 根据这些叙述，性选择在19世纪末曾有过一段短暂的流行时期（主要是在普通大众中），然后消失了，直到20世纪70年代才被重新发现。 这种“日蚀”的原因在于女性的选择;直到20世纪60年代末，选择的拟人化概念抑制了对性选择的广泛接受，与第二波女权主义的兴起和越来越多的女性可以主动“选择”的想法相一致。然而，1970年之前几十年女性选择的历史远比日食叙事所暗示的要复杂得多。 这段历史并没有出现在性选择标准叙述所强调的性别差异的田野研究中，而是出现在研究择偶行为的实验室中。 历史学家和生物学家倾向于将实验室和实地区分开来，再加上对性选择历史的实地调查的关注，掩盖了对女性选择的广泛兴趣，跨越了生物学科，以及它们之间的沟通和交流。 尽管在女性选择的方法上存在差异，但在种群遗传学、动物行为学和生物科学（如鱼类学和鸟类学）领域确实存在着大量的思想和实践。 在美国，狄奥多西·多布赞斯基（Theodosius Dobzhansky）为这些互动提供了一个焦点，在英国，尼古拉斯·丁伯根（Nikolaas Tinbergen）提供了另一个焦点。 鱼类学家和果蝇学家分别参与了不同的国际社区，这两个社区都包括跨学科界限的交流。 此外，不同国家对动物行为和种群遗传学感兴趣的生物学家之间的学科划分也有很大差异。 通过询问“女性的选择"对不同的研究项目意味着什么，本文将把这些重要的交流和交流点带入全面的视野，照亮二十世纪生物学的统一性和不统一性，跨越有机体的鸿沟，学科的裂痕，和广阔的海洋。

This Science and Technology Studies Doctoral Improvement Grant investigates how the choice of research organisms, experimental practices, and theoretical approaches across disciplines of biology shaped the values and meanings ascribed to female choice. The resulting narrative offers a window into the different but overlapping material and theoretical cultures of evolutionary biology in the twentieth century. The history of female choice in the published literature has been restricted to field-based narratives of the history of sexual selection. According to these narratives, sexual selection enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the late nineteenth-century (mostly among the general public), and then disappeared until the 1970s, when it was rediscovered. The cause of this "eclipse" is laid at the feet of female choice; anthropomorphic notions of choice inhibited the widespread acceptance of sexual selection until the late 1960s, commensurate with the rise of second-wave feminism and increasing acceptance of the idea that a female could actively "choose." However, the history of female choice in the decades preceding 1970 is far more complex than the eclipse narrative implies. This history is not found in the field studies of sexual difference emphasized by the standard narrative of sexual selection, but in experimental laboratories investigating mate-choice behavior. The tendency of historians and biologists to distinguish so strongly between the laboratory and the field, combined with the focus on field-based investigations in the history of sexual selection, has obscured the breadth of interest in female choice across biological disciplines and the nodes of communication and contestation among them. Despite differences in approach to female choice, a traffic of ideas and practices did exist across the fields of population genetics, ethology, and organismal-based sciences like ichthyology and ornithology. In the United States, Theodosius Dobzhansky provided one focal point for these interactions, and in Britain, Nikolaas Tinbergen provided another. Ichthyologists and drosophilists were involved in separate international communities, both of which included communication across disciplinary boundaries. Additionally, disciplinary divisions in different countries between biologists interested in animal behavior and population genetics varied considerably. By asking what "female choice meant to different research programs, this dissertation will bring these important points of communication and contestation into full view, illuminating the unities and disunities of biology in the twentieth century across organismal divides, disciplinary rifts, and vast oceans.