[wpaudio url="http://the-scientist.com/2011/01/01/book-excerpt-from-looking-for-a-few-good-males/erika-milam-3/" text="Listen to Erika Lorraine Milam read from her book, Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology" dl="0"]
Starting in the 1920s, three men—Ronald Aylmer Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright—began to integrate genetics with natural selection, using mathematics to describe the evolution of a population. Only one of these mathematically inclined evolutionary theorists paid significant attention to female choice: Ronald Fisher. After Fisher was rejected for fighting duty in the First World War, because of his terrible eyesight, he decided he could best serve his country by becoming a farmer. In 1917, Fisher and his new bride, along with her older sister (a long- time friend of Fisher), moved to a former gamekeeper’s cottage in Bradford, England. They were soon to be joined by several pigs, at least one calf, and children. Fisher sought to exemplify a eugenic life through subsistence farming, ...
