Male-female conflict over mating rate can drive rapid evolution and lead to female refusal to mate with males from other populations, so implicating sexual conflict in the generation of biodiversity. Sexual conflict is a pervasive feature of the living world. Although the sexes need one another, they rarely have exactly the same priorities. Males can often increase their reproductive success ― the number of offspring they sire ― simply by mating with as many females as possible. Females, on the other hand, are limited by their ability to produce offspring, and unnecessary matings may be costly. This difference sets the stage for an evolutionary arms race in which males are continually evolving new adaptations to get females to mate with them rather than with other males, and females are striving to resist this manipulation. On page 979 of this issue, Martin and Hosken provide evidence that sexual conflict can indeed drive very rapid evolution of female willingness to mate and of male traits that promote matings. They show that this process can lead to females being less ready to mate with males from other populations. This type of reduction in matings between populations could eventually lead to a complete lack of interbreeding, at which point the two groups would have become separate species.
展开▼
