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Erika Lorraine Milam
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Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Animals, History, Culture) 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Erika L. Milam (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 4 ratings
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2010 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

Why do female animals select certain mates, and how do scientists determine the answer? In considering these questions, Erika Lorraine Milam explores the fascinating patterns of experiment and interpretation that emerged as twentieth-century researchers studied sexual selection and female choice.

Approaching the topic from both biological and animal-studies perspectives, Milam not only presents a broad history of sexual selection—from Darwin to sociobiology—but also analyzes the animal-human continuum from the perspectives of sex, evolution, and behavior. She asks how social and cultural assumptions influence human-animal research and wonders about the implications of gender on scientific outcomes.

Although female choice appears to be a straightforward theoretical concept, the study of sexual selection has been anything but simple. Scientists in the early twentieth century investigated female choice in animals but did so with human social and sexual behavior as their ultimate objective. By the 1940s, evolutionary biologists and population geneticists shifted their focus, studying instead how evolution affected natural animal populations. Two decades later, organismal biologists once again redefined the investigation of sexual selection as sociobiology came to dominate the discipline.

Outlining the ever-changing history of this field of study, Milam uncovers lost mid-century research programs and finds that the discipline did not languish in the decades between Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and sociobiology, as observers commonly believed. Rather, population geneticists, ethologists, and organismal biologists alike continued to investigate this important theory throughout the twentieth century.

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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0801894190
  2. Edition
    1st
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Johns Hopkins University Press
  5. Publication date
    March 15, 2010
  6. Part of series
    Animals, History, Culture
  7. Language
    English
  8. File size
    1417 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

The discussion of how female choice in humans was treated throughout this time period is especially illuminating, as is the contention that there has never been a lull in interest on this topic. Highly recommended.

(Choice)

In Milam’s hands, the issue of female choice becomes a useful sampling device for revealing the distinctive methods and values of biologists of different stripes as they contended for intellectual jurisdiction over evolutionary theory and what came to be called ‘organismal biology.’ This is a fresh and fascinating book.

(Angela N. H. Creager, Princeton University)

A carefully researched, fascinating history of rich detail on a part of evolutionary biology that has so far garnered little attention among historians, scientists, and the public. This is a thoughtful book that appeals to anyone with an interest in animal behavior or the uneasy relationship between evolution science and the study of human social relationships.

(Elen Oneal Wilson Journal of Ornithology)

An essential read for anyone interested in the rigorous treatment of evolutionary sexual behavior and its implications.

(Mara Flannery Cosmos)

Milam's detailed attention to the different ways in which sexual selection was conceptualized and the diverse research programs that it motivated, as well as to the disciplinary disputes about the research and its history, reveals a fascinating and complex world.

(Marga Vicedo Isis)

Milam uses the topic of female choice as a lens through which to view intellectual, disciplinary, and social developments in the life sciences... An invaluable synthesis for historians of biology, scientists, and those with a popular interest in animal studies.

(Karen A. Rader Science)

By taking on the historical relationship between gender and evolution, humans and animals, and science and social analysis, Milam's study makes an important and fascinating contribution to numerous historical sub-disciplines.

(Kirsten Leng Gender and History)

Milam demonstrates that sexual selection has been contentious and politically loaded ever since Charles Darwin first proposed it... An accessible and important contribution to the history of an active topic of biological research today.

(Joan Roughgarden American Scientist)

Excellent and fascinating history... Anyone interested in our ambivalence over the degree to which humanity’s roots lay in its animal nature will benefit from reading this book.

(Margery Lucas PsycCRITIQUES)

Review

In Milam’s hands, the issue of female choice becomes a useful sampling device for revealing the distinctive methods and values of biologists of different stripes as they contended for intellectual jurisdiction over evolutionary theory and what came to be called ‘organismal biology.’ This is a fresh and fascinating book.

-- Angela N. H. Creager

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07DFNZM6Q
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press; 1st edition (March 15, 2010)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 15, 2010
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1417 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray for textbooks ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 354 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 4 ratings

About the author

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Erika Lorraine Milam

Erika Lorraine Milam

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Erika Lorraine Milam is a professor in the History Department at Princeton University, where she specializes in the history of science. She is author of Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

The enjoys collaborative projects and co-edited with Robert Nye a volume on Scientific Masculinities (Osiris vol. 30, 2015), and together with Suman Seth co-edited the open access volume Descent of Darwin: Race, Sex, and Human Nature (BJHS Themes vol. 6, 2021).

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
4 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

David Milliern
5.0 out of 5 stars Good for General Audience, Great for Scholars
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2013
Verified Purchase
Milam's book is generally a good book, but it doesn't come without some disappointment. Scholarly reviews of the book are glowing, and I do think the book satisfies most criteria of the highest standards in scholarship. However, I don't think the book has as much value for someone interested in acquiring a survey-like understanding of the history of sexual selection, and the narrative isn't sewn together as well as I expect from high-end scholarship in the history of science. On the latter point, I think this detracts from the value an intellectual or non-specialist academe might expect from such a well-reviewed text. If the book was, in places, not that interesting to me, the average person, intellectual, undergraduate, and non-specialist will probably not be too interested in large sections of the book. So let me do the following: I'll spend a few sentences on why a general Amazon audience might not be thrilled with the book, and then I will proceed with my glowing review.

The book has some rather irritating discontinuities. The chapters just don't mesh. The bright side is that the book's chapters are self-contained. The downside is the lack of smoothness in chapter-to-chapter transition. Reading any given chapter, the reader will not likely guess what is to be addressed in the following chapter. Milam is focusing her energies on an unwritten history, in a very extreme sense. (I don't know of a single historical work that catalogues the history of sexual selection, especially in the way that Milam wants.) The book is, I think, a bit lacking in narrative flow, too. This is a consequence of the just-the-facts-ma'am reporting style present in the text --not bad, in my opinion, but historians and history buffs like a good story. I had this impression that it wasn't quite clear to Milam the commentary to be brought to the facts, though her suggestive style does fill the gap in a number of places, playing to her advantage. As far as substance, I am not sure whether Milam was intentionally trying to be so parsimonious as she is in the book, because I felt there was quite a bit of history not being told. Character development wasn't happening, social and political forces weren't being mentioned...and on and on. I think all of the relevant "facts" were there, and one sees all of the forces' resultant influence (through the products of the science), but too much went unsaid. Too much.

As for the overall value of the book, it fills, what seems to me, a very, very important gap in the literature. In fact, I am expecting it to be a highly cited work, because the facts are so well laid out that, not even being a historian of the life sciences, I see research projects falling out of the text, at every turn. I appreciate the effort that goes into writing a book that doesn't have much already-collected literature to stand on, and, taking this into account, the book really is a fantastic work. As someone coming to sexual selection for basically the first time, I felt the way that the book began (w/ the Wallace-Darwin debate), building an historical trajectory, it was quite accessible and informative. In so saying, the book is very approachable, readable, and highly informative, regardless of the background the reader has going in. I rate the book at about four stars for the average reader interested in the subject, and five stars for the scholar, for an average of four and a half (but I round up). Most of all, I think this is an important gap-filling text for gender studies in science, as much as anything, and, therefore, well worth a perusal to all.
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Michael Lin
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2015
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Piers J. Hale
5.0 out of 5 stars A comprehensive history of this aspect of sexual selection in evolutionary biology
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2010
In addition to 'natural selection' Darwin had also invoked what he called 'sexual selection' which might account for the evolution of chacacteristics that rather than aiding in the preservation of the life of the indivudual concerned, aided in its ability to reproduce. In the process 'fitness' came to be focussed much more explicitly upon an organism's ability to leave progeny, than merely to survive. In Origin (1859), and further in Descent of Man (1871) Darwin had acknowledged two distinct aspects of sexual selection, "the law of battle" - the competition between males for posession of females, and "female choice", or, the female selection of male breeding partners. It is with this latter that Milam is concerned.

"Female choice" was always problematic, not only in light of the shocking idea to many victorian minds that women might select their mates!, but because it raised the problem of exactly what was implied by "choice". Certainly, while we might talk about female humans 'choosing' from a range of suitors (however unlikely in Victorian middle class circles) Many biologiosts asked the question: Do we really want to say that female insects 'choose' their partners in any meaningful sense of the word? Darwin clearly thought this was so in the higher animals, and spoke too of animals appreciating the beauty of their partners, thus female birds found the exotic plumage of the males aesthetically pleasing. Alfred Russel Wallace, the 'co-discoverer' of natural selection found the whole concept of sexual selection deeply troubling, and this is where Milam starts her story. Wallace argued that natural selection alone might account for the phenomena for which Darwin invoked sexual selection, and worried too that his friend was guilty of overly anthropomorphising the animals concerned. Milam tracks this ambivalence to the concept of female choice from the 1860s through to its apparent 'rediscovery' in the 1970s, the result of social as well as biological developments. On the one hand, the concept of "female choice" was hard to ignore in the context of second wave feminism, on the other, sexual selection, and with it female choice provided a convenient and productive field for organismal biologists to rally to in light of the increasing focus upon molecular biology.

American behavioural and British zoological studies figure in Milam's telling of this tale. Of course it is more nuanced than my retelling of it here, and Julian Huxley Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, Eibl-Eibesfeldt and David Lack recieve some detailed consideration, as do Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, John Maynard Smith, W.D. Hamilton and Marlene Zuk. This is not the place to go into a full-length summary of this work, but it is certainly a book that anyone interested in a rigourous treatment of the subject really must read. As Milam concludes, this story reveals that "Laboaratory and field research provided complementary approaches to understanding both the evolution of sexual behaviour and the ways in which behaviour could alter the processes of evolution itself" (167).

Milam gives us pause for thought regarding not only the role of sex in evolution, but regarding how contemporary understandings of sex and gender have shaped scientists understandings of the role of sex in evolution. Finally, of course, and as Milam concludes, this history asks us to think more deeply about the nature of 'choice' per se. As Darwin long ago noted, the issue of free will and 'choice' would always be difficult concepts in a world evolved through natural law.
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