Not long ago Eric Schliesser asked whether published results later shown false should be retracted. His example was Pauling’s 1953 paper on the structure of DNA. I agree with Eric that the record should not be tampered with, if by “retraction” one meant that the paper would be removed from the archive.
But in the case of another, also influential, paper I am inclined to think that a correction (not a retraction) is in order. The paper in question is a famous study by A. J. Bateman on sexual selection in fruit flies (see the references at the end). Gowaty, Kim, and Anderson have recently replicated the study. They showed that his methods are incapable of established the intended conclusion, which was that “sexual selection acted primarily on males through female choice and through male competition and profligacy in mating”.
We are unique in reporting a repetition of Bateman […] using his methods of parentage assignment, which linked sex differences in variance of reproductive success and variance in number of mates in small populations of Drosophila melanogaster. […] Bateman’s method overestimated subjects with zero mates, underestimated subjects with one or more mates, and produced systematically biased estimates of offspring number by sex. Bateman’s methodology mismeasured fitness variances that are the key variables of sexual selection.
I am in no way an expert on the science of sexual selection, so I will simply quote a bit more on the significance of Bateman’s work.
Bateman’s study (1) of within-sex selection in Drosophila melanogaster is a foundational paper in sexual selection, second only to Darwin’s pioneering book (2); it empirically anchored within-sex variance in number of mates (VNM) as a key correlate of variance in reproductive success (VRS) and as the metric of sexual selection. Bateman said his results showed that male number of mates (NM) was more variable than female NM; male reproductive success (RS) was more variable than female RS; and RS in males, but not in females, was because of NM. His conclusions were: sexual selection acted primarily on males through female choice and through male competition and profligacy in mating, so that some males mated more frequently than others, producing higher VRS among males than among females because of the positive relationship between number of mates and reproductive success for males, but not for females.
Bateman’s (1) paper was cited relatively infrequently before its rediscovery by Trivers (3), who used Bateman’s results to buttress his arguments that the sex-differential cost of reproduction selectively favored coy, discriminating females and competitive, ardent males. After Trivers (3), citation of Bateman soared (4), as it did again after Arnold (5) discussed “Bateman’s Principles” as corollaries of sex differences in behavior and fitness variances.
Of most interest, perhaps, to philosophers is their conclusion.
We are left wondering why earlier readers failed to spot the inferential problems with Bateman’s original study. The main implication we take from the present study is one earlier critics (8, 9) made: The paradigmatic power of the world-view (16) captured in Bateman’s conclusions and the phrase “Bateman’s Principles” (5) may dazzle readers, obscuring from view methodological weaknesses and reasonable alternative hypotheses explaining VNM and VRS.
References
- (1) Bateman AJ (1948) Intra-sexual selection in Drosophila. Heredity (Edinb) 2:349–368.
- (2) Darwin C (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (John Murray, London).
- (3) Trivers RL (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection. In: Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, ed Campbell B (Aldine, Chicago, IL), pp 136–179.
- (4) Snyder BF, Gowaty PA (2007) A reappraisal of Bateman’s classic study of intrasexual selection. Evolution 61:2457–2468.
- (5) Arnold SJ (1994) Bateman principles and the measurement of sexual selection in plants and animals. Am Nat 144:S126–S149.
- (8) Dewsbury DA (2005) The Darwin-Bateman paradigm in historical context. Integr Comp Biol 45:831–837.
- (9) Tang-Martinez Z, Ryder TB (2005) The problem with paradigms: Bateman’s worldview as a case study. Integr Comp Biol 45:821–830.
- (16) Knight J (2002) Sexual stereotypes. Nature 415:254–256.
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