The courtship of animals / by W.P. Pycraft.

  • Pycraft, W. P. (William Plane), 1868-1942.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The courtship of animals / by W.P. Pycraft. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS Selection theory have been dazzled by the tinsel, and have missed the essential elements—the physical and psychological side of the display — the contortions, prancings, and so on, and they have missed the even more important element, the preliminary struggle for territory. In this new light, the gaily-bedizened individuals of the Insect world may be surveyed afresh. The explanation of such of their features as are commonly attributed to Sexual Selection in terms of female choice, whereby only the most favoured from among a crowd of suitors could hope to succeed, may now be replaced by that which obtains also in the case of the higher animals. It seems to fit the facts better. One cannot understand, for example, how, on the interpretation of Sexual Selection, the extraordinary disparity in numbers between the sexes of some species of Butterflies came about. Thus in that marvellously beautiful genus Ornithoptera there is one species (0. brookiana) in which the females are excessively rare ; so much so that the collector Kunstler could only obtain fifteen females to one thousand males. Though the males, among the Butterflies, are commonly much more numerous than the females, the disparity is rarely so great as with this species ; but there are many in which the proportion of males to females is as fifty to one. As with the higher vertebrates selection affords no explanation of this curious disproportion. Though according to Weismann it fulfills the first postulate in ' Sexual Selection,' namely, that there be an unequal number of individuals in the two sexes. But Sexual Selection here has a little over-reached itself, for surely one hundred suitors seems an embarrassing number for an inexperienced female to have to choose from 1 To say