Dave Hone: commitment

Transcript context

……a T-rex might have. So just to kind of take that to a place of what we know and what we don’t know, so can we kind of know something about their social life, where they lived, how they lived? So the very fact that they have these apparently socio-sexually selected signals, the, the little crest and stuff in the head… So there’s a branch of sexual selection called mutual sexual selection and the black swans are an example of this. The classic sexual selection is yeah, your peacocks and your lions and things like this. Males are bigger and more flamboyant and whatever it is and they’re doing all the competing. But yet mutual sexual selection, and this is really common in a whole bunch of things that people are familiar with but don’t know. Loads of sea birds, starlings, the common starling that we have in Europe and has been introduced into the US, parrots, various other things, where basically males and females invest similarly in rearing the offspring. And so the idea generally both with handicap and sexy son, but particularly with handicap, is the idea is the males are proving their worth. They’re basically saying, “I’m the biggest, strongest, healthiest, I’ve got the best genes, I should be the father of your offspring.” They go around showing off and then mate with as many females as possible while the females then do all the work and make the nest and look after the chicks and, yeah, or rear them or give birth or whatever it may be, yada, yada, yada. And so the idea with mutual sexual selection is well, what if there’s not much food around? Things like puffins or, you know, penguins in the Arctic where, you know, where the male sits with the egg and the female toddles off, gets food and then comes back two months later or whatever it is. On their own they can’t rear the offspring. They have to have a male investment. Well now, suddenly the male’s now putting loads of effort in, so the male’s now in the same position that a female would be in under the normal conditions. You don’t want to be the sexiest, toughest, biggest male and you can only mate once, all right? There’s, there’s various cheats, but we won’t get into that just yet. You’re only going to mate once and you’re going to put all your effort into helping rearing offspring rather than chasing down as many girls as possible. Are you going to go for the biggest, fittest female as well or are you going to go for the small, weedy one that doesn’t look very well? You go for the best one. Well, how do you know that? Well ’cause she’s got a crest as well, and so suddenly you now get mutual ornamentation just like the black swans where the males are checking out the curliest females and the females are checking out the curliest males, and you’ll see they mutually pair up. This is what we see with things like starlings. Males like the brightest females, females like the brightest males, they tend to form pairs. t the curliest males, and you’ll see they mutually pair up. This is what we see with things like starlings. Males like the brightest females, females like the brightest males, they tend to form pairs. The darkest and least bright ones are obviously kind of left with each other at the bottom of the pile. They tend to pair up. But it means that when you’ve got signals in both males and females like every triceratops or every tyrannosaurus, it at least hints that they’re going down this route and that they might cooperate for reproduction.…

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