"Representative Trantis"  wrote in message
>
> 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.
>
Natural selection doesn't collapse without sexual selection. It is simply
that there are a few phenomena that it has difficulty explaining - eg the
peacock's tail (but not the peacock's beak, or gut, or immune system).

The reason is probably because the mechanisms of sexual selection are not
intutive. Darwin supposes that the peacock's tail appealed to the peahen's
aesthetic sense, which didn't explain why the aesthetic sense was there in
the first place.

The second reason is that natural selection was, and still is, controversial
amongst non-biologists. This distracted people from developing the theory of
evolution rather than simply defending it.
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