Biologists have proposed a variety of explanations for extravagant sexual displays, and controversies over explanations define the history of sexual selection research. Recently, Richard Prum has defended Darwin’s idea that the evolution of sexual displays is driven by arbitrary and nonadaptive preferences of potential mates. Prum argues that this explanation should be the null model for sexual selection research. I show that if we adopted Prum’s proposal, the inferences we could be justified in making are more modest than he claims. I also discuss problems with estimating model parameters that at present prevent his proposal from being useful in practice.

中文翻译：

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配合选择和空模型

生物学家对奢侈的性展示提出了多种解释，而关于解释的争议定义了性选择研究的历史。最近，Richard Prum 为达尔文的观点辩护，即性展示的进化是由潜在配偶的任意和非适应性偏好驱动的。Prum 认为这种解释应该是性选择研究的无效模型。我表明，如果我们采纳 Prum 的提议，我们可以做出的推论比他声称的要温和得多。我还讨论了估计模型参数的问题，这些问题目前阻止他的建议在实践中有用。