The evolution of female promiscuity
8 April 2005, 16:00 Large Operon
Olivia Judson, Imperial College, UK
Males are natural philanderers, trying to seduce every female in sight; females are naturally chaste, more interested in having babies than having sex. Right? Wrong. Over the past twenty years, females of thousands of species have been shown to be rampantly promiscuous – and interestingly, promiscuous females tend to have more and healthier children than their more virtuous counterparts. These discoveries have taken biologists entirely by surprise, and have forced a complete re-evaluation of our understanding of female sexual behaviour.
In this talk, I will discuss why no one expected to find that females are promiscuous. I will then consider the reasons that they are; and I will finish with a discussion of the unpleasant consequences that female promiscuity has for males.
Biography
Olivia Judson is a research fellow at Imperial College, and the author of Dr Tatiana's 'Sex advice to all creation'; in 2003, the book was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction, and won the Zoological Society of London's BIOSIS award for communicating zoology. It has been translated into more than 14 languages, including Estonian and Chinese, and is the subject of a three part television series for Channel 4 (UK).