Timeline: From Superstar to Pariah
One day in the early spring of 1993, Richard Palmer received a paper by a Danish ornithologist, Anders Pape Möller. Palmer, an associate editor at Evolution, was impressed by the paper, but he was troubled by one of Möller's key statistics.
Although he had met Möller only once, Palmer was familiar with his work. Both were fascinated by the promise of fluctuating asymmetry, the subject of the paper in question. "If you measure the right and left sides of the body very precisely, they're never exact mirror images," explains Palmer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "Those differences are random, and what they tell you is the inability of the right side of the body to produce an exact mirror of the left."
Möller's paper claimed that asymmetry in the tail feathers of the barn swallow was ...
