Book Excerpt from Looking for a Few Good Males

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, and it was only after the war that financial constraints, along with the continued exhortations of Charles Darwin’s fourth son and eighth child, ...