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| Auditory processing vs. mate choice via coercion and resistance, persuasion and skepticism |
| Jeffrey R Lucas. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States |
The “old” narrative about the process of sexual selection is that courters generate signals that provide information about the courter’s value as a mate.� How could signals provide accurate information? Zahavi’s handicap principle and unfalsifiable index signals provided the answer. A new narrative suggests that mate choice instead often results from systems where “…mate-choice mechanisms and courter traits are locked in an arms race of coercion and resistance, persuasion and skepticism” (Rosenthal & Ryan 2022), where chooser sensory properties are adaptations for factors that are unrelated to mating. I suggest that temporal plasticity of the auditory system provides a counter example to the coercion narrative.� More importantly, this plasticity clearly upregulates components of the auditory system that enhance the chooser’s decoding of mating signals during the breeding season – properties that are in turn downregulated when breeding behavior ceases. In effect, the auditory system is coming to the signal, not running from it. This raises an interesting question: is the auditory system special relative to sexual selection? |