Patricia Adair Gowaty

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Patricia Adair Gowaty is an American evolutionary biologist. Gowaty is a professor emeritus at the University of Georgia and the University of California, Los Angeles. [1] [2]

Life and career

She received her B.A. in biology at Tulane University and her PhD in zoology at Clemson University in 1980. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. [3]

Gowaty is known for her many articles about human and animal behavior and evolution. She is author and editor of a book that seeks to combine feminist theory and Darwinian evolutionary biology. [4] She has also written about the effects of and importance of rape in understanding human evolution. [5] Her recent research has focused on the concept of reproductive compensation in population genetics. [6] [7]

In 2012 Gowaty and colleagues reported [8] a precise replication of Angus Bateman's classic experiment on sexual selection in Drosophila. The study showed that Bateman's methodology was flawed. Once these flaws are accounted for, the experimental data did not support his conclusions. [9]

Gowaty is married to biologist Stephen P. Hubbell, with whom she has co-authored many journal articles about ecology and evolutionary biology. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexual selection</span> Mode of natural selection involving the choosing of and competition for mates

Sexual selection is a mechanism of evolution in which members of one biological sex choose mates of the other sex to mate with, and compete with members of the same sex for access to members of the opposite sex. These two forms of selection mean that some individuals have greater reproductive success than others within a population, for example because they are more attractive or prefer more attractive partners to produce offspring. Successful males benefit from frequent mating and monopolizing access to one or more fertile females. Females can maximise the return on the energy they invest in reproduction by selecting and mating with the best males.

Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within lineages. Charles Darwin was the first to describe the role of natural selection in speciation in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. He also identified sexual selection as a likely mechanism, but found it problematic.

Allopatric speciation – also referred to as geographic speciation, vicariant speciation, or its earlier name the dumbbell model – is a mode of speciation that occurs when biological populations become geographically isolated from each other to an extent that prevents or interferes with gene flow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fisherian runaway</span> Sexual selection mechanism

Fisherian runaway or runaway selection is a sexual selection mechanism proposed by the mathematical biologist Ronald Fisher in the early 20th century, to account for the evolution of ostentatious male ornamentation by persistent, directional female choice. An example is the colourful and elaborate peacock plumage compared to the relatively subdued peahen plumage; the costly ornaments, notably the bird's extremely long tail, appear to be incompatible with natural selection. Fisherian runaway can be postulated to include sexually dimorphic phenotypic traits such as behavior expressed by a particular sex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anisogamy</span> Sexual reproduction involving a large, female gamete and a small, male gamete

Anisogamy is a form of sexual reproduction that involves the union or fusion of two gametes that differ in size and/or form. The smaller gamete is male, a sperm cell, whereas the larger gamete is female, typically an egg cell. Anisogamy is predominant among multicellular organisms. In both plants and animals, gamete size difference is the fundamental difference between females and males.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Charlesworth</span> British evolutionary biologist (born 1945)

Brian Charlesworth is a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of Biology Letters. Since 1997, he has been Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IEB) in Edinburgh. He has been married since 1967 to the British evolutionary biologist Deborah Charlesworth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen P. Hubbell</span> American ecologist

Stephen P. Hubbell is an American ecologist known for his work on tropical rainforests, theoretical ecology, and biodiversity. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Georgia and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Joan Roughgarden is an American ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She has engaged in theory and observation of coevolution and competition in Anolis lizards of the Caribbean, and recruitment limitation in the rocky intertidal zones of California and Oregon. She has more recently become known for her rejection of sexual selection, her theistic evolutionism, and her work on holobiont evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexy son hypothesis</span> Postulate in biology

The sexy son hypothesis in evolutionary biology and sexual selection, proposed by Patrick J. Weatherhead and Raleigh J. Robertson of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1979, states that a female's ideal mate choice among potential mates is one whose genes will produce males with the best chance of reproductive success. This implies that other benefits the father can offer the mother or offspring are less relevant than they may appear, including his capacity as a parental caregiver, territory and any nuptial gifts. Fisher's principle means that the sex ratio is always near 1:1 between males and females, yet what matters most are her "sexy sons'" future breeding successes, more likely if they have a promiscuous father, in creating large numbers of offspring carrying copies of her genes. This sexual selection hypothesis has been researched in species such as the European pied flycatcher.

<i>Drosophila pseudoobscura</i> Species of fly

Drosophila pseudoobscura is a species of fruit fly, used extensively in lab studies of speciation. It is native to western North America.

Reproductive compensation was originally a theory to explain why recessive genetic disorders may persist in a population. It was proposed in 1967 as an explanation for the maintenance of Rh negative blood groups. Reproductive compensation refers to the tendency of parents, seeking a given family size, to replace offspring that are lost to genetic disorders. It may also refer to the effects of increased maternal or parental investment in caring for disadvantaged offspring, seeking to compensate for genetic disadvantage. It is a theory that suggests that behavioral as well as physiological factors may play a role in the level of recessive genetic disorders in a population.

Bateman's principle, in evolutionary biology, is that in most species, variability in reproductive success is greater in males than in females. It was first proposed by Angus John Bateman (1919–1996), an English geneticist. Bateman suggested that, since males are capable of producing millions of sperm cells with little effort, while females invest much higher levels of energy in order to nurture a relatively small number of eggs, the female plays a significantly larger role in their offspring's reproductive success. Bateman's paradigm thus views females as the limiting factor of parental investment, over which males will compete in order to copulate successfully.

Nancy A. Moran is an American evolutionary biologist and entomologist, University of Texas Leslie Surginer Endowed Professor, and co-founder of the Yale Microbial Diversity Institute. Since 2005, she has been a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Her seminal research has focused on the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum and its bacterial symbionts including Buchnera (bacterium). In 2013, she returned to the University of Texas at Austin, where she continues to conduct research on bacterial symbionts in aphids, bees, and other insect species. She has also expanded the scale of her research to bacterial evolution as a whole. She believes that a good understanding of genetic drift and random chance could prevent misunderstandings surrounding evolution. Her current research goal focuses on complexity in life-histories and symbiosis between hosts and microbes, including the microbiota of insects.

Interlocus sexual conflict is a type of sexual conflict that occurs through the interaction of a set of antagonistic alleles at two or more different loci, or the location of a gene on a chromosome, in males and females, resulting in the deviation of either or both sexes from the fitness optima for the traits. A co-evolutionary arms race is established between the sexes in which either sex evolves a set of antagonistic adaptations that is detrimental to the fitness of the other sex. The potential for reproductive success in one organism is strengthened while the fitness of the opposite sex is weakened. Interlocus sexual conflict can arise due to aspects of male–female interactions such as mating frequency, fertilization, relative parental effort, female remating behavior, and female reproductive rate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social selection</span> Term used in biology

Social selection is a term used with varying meanings in biology.

Wyatt Wheaton Anderson was an American geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Genetics in the University of Georgia's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. He was also the dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences from 1992 until he stepped down in 2004. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1987, and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laboratory experiments of speciation</span> Biological experiments

Laboratory experiments of speciation have been conducted for all four modes of speciation: allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, and sympatric; and various other processes involving speciation: hybridization, reinforcement, founder effects, among others. Most of the experiments have been done on flies, in particular Drosophila fruit flies. However, more recent studies have tested yeasts, fungi, and even viruses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seminal fluid protein</span> Non-sperm component of semen

Seminal fluid proteins (SFPs) or accessory gland proteins (Acps) are one of the non-sperm components of semen. In many animals with internal fertilization, males transfer a complex cocktail of proteins in their semen to females during copulation. These seminal fluid proteins often have diverse, potent effects on female post-mating phenotypes. SFPs are produced by the male accessory glands.

Victoria Louise Sork is an American scientist who is Professor and Dean of Life Sciences at University of California, Los Angeles. She studies tree populations in California and the Eastern United States using genomics, evolutionary biology and conservation biology. Sork is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather Heying</span> American evolutionary biologist

Heather E. Heying is an American evolutionary biologist, former professor, and author, who came to national attention following the Evergreen State College protests in 2017. She has been associated with the informal group known as the intellectual dark web and testified at the US Department of Justice forum on Free Speech on College Campuses in 2018. Heying opposed COVID-19 vaccines and promoted the unproven belief that the drug ivermectin is effective in treating the disease.

References

  1. https://ecology.uga.edu/directory/patricia-gowaty/
  2. https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/person/patricia-gowaty/
  3. "UCLA Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology" . Retrieved 22 December 2008.
  4. Gowaty, PA (1997). Feminism and Evolutionary Biology - Boundaries, intersections and frontiers. Springer. ISBN   0-412-07361-7.
  5. Gowaty, PA (2003). Cheryl Brown Travis (ed.). Power Asymmetries Between the Sexes, Mate Preferences, and Components of Fitness. The MIT Press. pp. 61–86. ISBN   0-262-20143-7.
  6. Gowaty, PA (2008). "Reproductive Compensation". Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 21 (5): 1189–200. doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2008.01559.x. PMID   18564347.
  7. Gowaty PA, Anderson WW, Bluhm CK, Drickamer LC, Kim YK, Moore AJ (2007). "The hypothesis of reproductive compensation and its assumptions about mate preferences and offspring viability". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (38): 15023–15027. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0706622104 . PMC   1986606 . PMID   17848509.
  8. Gowaty PA, Kim YK, and Anderson WW (2012). "No evidence of sexual selection in a repetition of Bateman's classic study of Drosophila melanogaster". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (29): 11740–11745. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1207851109 . PMC   3406809 . PMID   22689966.
  9. University of California - Los Angeles (26 June 2012). "Biologists reveal potential 'fatal flaw' in iconic sexual selection study". ScienceDaily. Retrieved 2017-01-26.
  10. "Research Magazine". uga.edu.