Mate Choice - Direct and Indirect Benefits

Direct and Indirect Benefits

Being choosy (having a bias in the context of mating) must incur a fitness advantage in order for this behavior to evolve. Two types of fitness benefits (direct and indirect) are thought to drive the evolutionary mechanisms of mate choice.

Direct benefits are those that increase the fitness of the choosy sex through direct material advantages. These benefits include but are not limited to increased territory quality, increased parental care, and protection from predators. There is much support for maintenance of mate choice by direct benefits and it is the least controversial model to explain discriminate mating.

Indirect benefits increase genetic fitness for the offspring. When it appears that the choosy sex does not receive direct benefits from his or her mate, indirect benefits may be the payoff for being selective. Examples of indirect benefits include better genetic quality and more attractive offspring. R. A. Fisher described this less obvious model in a book called The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Fisher explained that, through indirect selection, fitter individuals inherit both the genes and the mating preference for some indicator trait. This linkage of an indicator trait and the preference for such trait results in exaggerated phenotypes and is known as Fisherian runaway selection.

Read more about this topic:  Mate Choice

Famous quotes containing the words direct and, direct, indirect and/or benefits:

    Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)