Indeed a full-scale Kuhnian paradigm shift is starting to be acknowledged where traditional sexual selection in terms of male-male competition and female choice, rather than being the golden standard for interpreting mating interactions and outcomes, merely becomes “ an interesting emergent property of a more ancient and far-reaching evolutionary dynamic: sexual conflict”. The exponentially increasing literature on sexual conflict involving various organisms includes population crosses, mating experiments, meta-analyses of groups with different mating systems, comparisons of evolutionary rates in sexual versus asexual characters, theoretical models, experimental manipulations of sexual traits and studies of the economics and costs of matings and all contribute to the growing body of evidence. Drosophila provide a model system on a microevolutionary scale, and in particular, artificial selection experiments have convincingly demonstrated sexual antagonistic coevolution, involving accessory gland substances in the male ejaculate that in various ways affect the female. However, despite claims of the widespread occurence of sexual conflict fuelling arms races, credible empirical examples from a phylogenetic perspective, are largely lacking and the major question today is whether sexual conflict really generates sexually antagonistic evolution. Rapid evolution of male adaptations and female counter-adaptations, explicitly predicts that changes in male and female characters should be correlated as coincidental transformations on internal branches of a phylogeny. Sexual conflict in mating systems, due to differences in investment and direct mating costs, can lead to intersexual arms races, as well as being a potential engine of speciation.
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