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. 2020 Sep 14;10(19):10325-10342.
doi: 10.1002/ece3.6420. eCollection 2020 Oct.

Bateman's Data: Inconsistent with "Bateman's Principles"

Thierry Hoquet  1 , William C Bridges  2 , Patricia Adair Gowaty  3
Affiliations

Bateman's Data: Inconsistent with "Bateman's Principles"

Thierry Hoquet et al. Ecol Evol. .

Abstract

A.J. Bateman (1948) hypothesized that a metric of sexual selection is in sex differences of intrasexual variance in number of mates (V NM). AJB predicted that (a) males have greater variance in reproductive success (V RS) than females; (b) males have greater V NM than females; and (c) a positive relationship between V NM and V RS is stronger among males. AJB used phenotypically observable mutations in offspring to identify parents and to count subjects' NM and RS. AJB's conclusions matched his predictions, later called "Bateman's Principles." Empirical challenges to his conclusions guided analyses herein. (a) AJB's analysis pseudo-replicated sample sizes, violating a sexual selection assumption: That is, individuals must be in the same population to choose and compete. (b) AJB's methods overestimated subjects with no mates while underestimating subjects with one or more. (c) A replication (Gowaty et al., 2012) showed that offspring inheriting nametags from both parents often died before expressing adult phenotypes, proving some of AJB's methods produced biased data. Science historian Thierry Hoquet located AJB's archived, handwritten laboratory notes, photocopied, and transcribed them. We tested each of the 65 unique populations for expected combinations in offspring of parental mutations: 41.5% failed Punnett's tests: Offspring carrying nametags simultaneously from both parents were missing showing estimates of parents' NM and V NM were undercounted. 58.5% of populations met Punnett's expectations providing an unparalleled opportunity to re-evaluate AJB's predictions. 34 unbiased populations had no sex differences in V RS; 37 had no sex differences in V NM. No sex differences in slopes of RS and NM occurred in any unbiased population. Regressions showed weak, positive, significant associations between V NM and V RS for females and males, contrary to AJB's prediction that the relationship would be positive in males but not in females. AJB's laboratory data are inconsistent with "Bateman's Principles."

Keywords: Bateman (1948); sex differences; sexual selection; variance in number of mates; variance in reproductive success.

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Conflict of interest statement

None declared.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
A photograph of Drosohila melangogaster
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
(a) The published “table 4” with its original legend from page 357 in Bateman, A. J. 1948. Heredity (Edinb) 2:349–368 (reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd. License Number: 2960430598991). Note that in both renditions of the table that only 86 (18.7%) of 459 total offspring were double‐mutant “DD” offspring, that is, those inheriting a nametag from each parent, significantly fewer than the frequency of 25% of total offspring required by Mendel's law (also called "Punnett's expectations.") implying that this population gave unreliable estimates of number of and variances of number of mates and reproductive success of female and male subjects. (b) A photocopy (included with permission John Innes Archives courtesy of the John Innes Foundation, used under CC‐BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) of a data table as it appears in AJB's laboratory notes.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
The 65 vertical lines represent one of the populations in AJB’s lab notes. The four types of offspring for each population are represented from top to bottom (DD, D+, +D, and ++ see Table 2). The light grey shading at the top of each vertical bar shows graphically that the frequencies of DD offspring were often less than the expected ¼
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Bateman gradients for the 38 fair populations. None show significant sex differences in slopes between females and males. See statistical tests in Table 6
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Meta‐analyses of the relationships between V NM and V RS for females (panel a) and for males (panel b), using the 38 unbiased populations from AJB's laboratory notes. In (a) for females, the r 2 = 0.25, N = 38, df = 37, p < .0013; in (b) for males, the r 2 = 0.185, N = 38, df = 37, p < .0070
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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