ReviewCold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology2014
The sexual cascade and the rise of pre-ejaculatory (Darwinian) sexual selection, sex roles, and sexual conflict.
Review in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
77 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- How sperm competition shapes the evolution of testes and sperm: a meta-analysis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Pooled it
- Crossing experiments suggest a simple genetic basis of complex male self-sacrifice phenotypes in widow spiders.Biology letters · 2026Article
- Reexamining Sexual and Species Recognition in Butterflies: The Partner-Hazard Space Framework.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Biological Sex Is Binary and Rooted in Anisogamy.Ecology letters · 2026Review
- Analysis of the impact of gene evolution on reproductive effects reveals prevalent sexual and germline-soma conflicts.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- The Evolution of Same-sex Sexual Behavior: Using Old Theory to Answer New Questions.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Review
- Thirty Years of the Biology of Spermatozoa: The Rise and Future of an Evolutionary Paradigm.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- There Are Only Two Sexes and There Can Never Be More.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Mapping the Conceptual Terrain Avoiding Common Conflations: Tentative Guide to Fruitful Discussion about Sexes and Genders.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Ejaculate Ejection by Female Fruit Flies Does Not Correlate With Mating Latency or Male Presence, Irrespective of How Ejection Is Measured.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- A male-biased sex ratio increases the opportunity for precopulatory sexual selection but does not change the Bateman gradient.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Positive selection and relaxed purifying selection contribute to rapid evolution of sex-biased genes in green seaweed Ulva.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Cell size and selection for stress-induced cell fusion in unicellular eukaryotes.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The correlation between anisogamy and sexual selection intensity-the broad theoretical predictions.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Anisogamy and sex roles: a commentary.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Anisogamy and the Darwin-Bateman paradigm.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- The logic of conventional and reversed Bateman gradients.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- An ulvophycean marine green alga produces large parthenogenetic isogametes as predicted by the gamete dynamics model for the evolution of anisogamy.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Semen adaptation to microbes in an insect.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Transcriptomic changes in the posterior pallium of male zebra finches associated with social niche conformance.BMC genomics · 2024Article
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
After brief historic overviews of sexual selection and sexual conflict, I argue that pre-ejaculatory sexual selection (the form of sexual selection discussed by Darwin) arose at a late stage in an inevitable succession of transitions flowing from the early evolution of syngamy to the evolution of copulation and sex roles. If certain conditions were met, this "sexual cascade" progressed inevitably, if not, sexual strategy remained fixed at a given stage. Prolonged evolutionary history of intense sperm competition/selection under external fertilization preceded the rise of advanced mobility, which generated pre-ejaculatory sexual selection, followed on land by internal fertilization and reduced sperm competition in the form of postcopulatory sexual selection. I develop a prospective model of the early evolution of mobility, which, as Darwin realized, was the catalyst for pre-ejaculatory sexual selection. Stages in the cascade should be regarded as consequential rather than separate phenomena and, as such, invalidate much current opposition to Darwin-Bateman sex roles. Potential for sexual conflict occurs throughout, greatly increasing later in the cascade, reaching its peak under precopulatory sexual selection when sex roles become highly differentiated.
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