Anthony Campbell  wrote:

> In article , Representative
Trantis wrote:
> > 
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > 
> > Why did it take so long for sexual selection to catch on and become fully
> > accepted, especially when you consider that it's all that stands in the way
> > of natural selction collapsing.
> > 
> 
> Two possible reasons come to mind:
> 
> 1. The theory assigns an important role to female choice, which was an
> unfashionable idea in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
> 
> 2. Victorian prudery.
> 
> 
> In any case, natural selection itself was not accorded much importance
> by many evolutionists in the latter part of the 19C. Even TH Huxley did
> not emphasize it. Only after the belated recognition of Mendelian
> genetics and the work of Ronald Fisher, Theodore Dobzhanski, Ernst Mayr
> and others in the 20C did it come back into prominence; this was the
> beginning of "neo-Darwinism".
> 
First, it's Dobzhansky, unless you use another orthography, in which
case it's Dobzhanskii, but at any rate, "Neo-Darwinism"
"began" around
1893 when George Romanes called the writings of August Weismann and
Alfred Russel Wallace, who stressed the all-sufficiency of natural
selection as the answer to any puzzle or trait, "neo-Darwinist" and
"ultra-Darwinist". He also said they out-Darwined Darwin". Neither of
them had much use for sexual selection, although early on in his career
Wallace did allow that male choice (but not female choice :-) might play
a role in some cases.

The *second* neo-Darwinism began with Ronald Fisher's _The Genetical
Theory of Natural Selection_ in 1930 - Fisher discussed panmictic
selection only, and selection was the focus of his work (with an eye to
eugenics). Mayr and others followed him. Interestingly, Dobzhansky made
use of the work of Sewall Wright, who noted and named the effect we call
"genetic drift" as an alternative to selectionist explanations.

I agree with the external explanation (that female choice was not
popular in the 19thC, showing yet again that Darwin's empirical work
overcame his prejudices), and that selection itself was not popular in
the period from c1880 to 1930, as Bowler's _The eclipse of Darwinism_
recounts. But I think also that the logic was not worked out until
natural (i.e., nonsexual) selection was formalised.
-- 
John Wilkins wilkins.id.au
For long you live and high you fly, 
and smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
and all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
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