摘要
The 1970s and 1980s marked the apotheosis of Dar- win＇s （1871） conjecture, dismissed in its day, that mate choice driven by individual aesthetic preferences - a ＂taste for the beautiful＂ - plays a central role in evolu- tion. The major lines of mate-choice research were largely defined by 1990. Animal behaviorists and neu- roethologists had shown that preferences were multidi- mensional （Burley, 1981） and contingent on a multipli- city of factors （Bateson, 1978）. Evolutionary geneticists and behavioral ecologists argued that positive （Zahavi A, 1975）, negative （Parker, 1979） or neutral （Lande, 1981） fitness effects could drive the evolution of mating prefe- rences, or that preferences could ~merge from functions unrelated to mating （Endler, 1992, Ryan, 1990）. Under any of these scenarios, mate choice could play an inte- gral role in the origin and maintenance of gene flow barriers among species and in the structure of natural populations （Lande, 1981, Searcy, 1982, West- Eberhard, 1983）. Many of these ideas were crystallized in an eponymous volume edited by Bateson （1983）; progress was summarized a decade later as part of Andersson＇s （1994） encyclopedic Sexual Selection.
