ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
A rigorous comparison of sexual selection indexes via simulations of diverse mating systems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Stronger net selection on males across animals.eLife · 2021Pooled it
- Diagnosing confounded Bateman gradients.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- A male-biased sex ratio increases the opportunity for precopulatory sexual selection but does not change the Bateman gradient.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- QInfoMating: sexual selection and assortative mating estimation software.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Agent-based modelling reveals feedback loops and non-linearity between mating system evolution and disease dynamics.PloS one · 2025Article
- High rates of male courtship in a female-ornamented pipefish.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The impact of small groups on pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection in polyandrous populations.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Disentangling the causes of temporal variation in the opportunity for sexual selection.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Sexual selection in females and the evolution of polyandry.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Immediate predation risk alters the relationship between potential and realised selection on male traits in the Trinidad guppyProceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Intraspecific variation in male mating strategies in an African ground squirrel (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- The relationship between sexual dimorphism and androgen response element proliferation in primate genomes.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Alternative reproductive tactics in male freshwater fish influence the accuracy of species recognition.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The repeatable opportunity for selection differs between pre- and postcopulatory fitness components.Evolution letters · 2021Article
- Sexual selection after gamete release in broadcast spawning invertebrates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- No evidence of male-biased sexual selection in a snake with conventional Darwinian sex roles.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Sexual selection, phenotypic plasticity and female reproductive output.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Sex peptide receptor-regulated polyandry modulates the balance of pre- and post-copulatory sexual selection in Drosophila.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Sex roles and sexual selection: lessons from a dynamic model system.Current zoology · 2018Article
- Sexual selection predicts species richness across the animal kingdom.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sexual selection is a cornerstone of evolutionary theory, but measuring it has proved surprisingly difficult and controversial. Various proxy measures--e.g., the Bateman gradient and the opportunity for sexual selection--are widely used in empirical studies. However, we do not know how reliably these measures predict the strength of sexual selection across natural systems, and most perform poorly in theoretical worst-case scenarios. Here we provide a rigorous comparison of eight commonly used indexes of sexual selection. We simulated 500 biologically plausible mating systems, based on the templates of five well-studied species that cover a diverse range of reproductive life histories. We compared putative indexes to the actual strength of premating sexual selection, measured as the strength of selection on a simulated "mating trait." This method sidesteps a key weakness of empirical studies, which lack an appropriate yardstick against which proxy measures can be assessed. Our model predicts that, far from being useless, the best proxy measures reliably track the strength of sexual selection across biologically realistic scenarios. The maximum intensity of precopulatory sexual selection s'max (the Jones index) outperformed all other indexes and was highly correlated with the strength of sexual selection. In contrast, the Bateman gradient and the opportunity for sexual selection were poor predictors of sexual selection, despite their continuing popularity.
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