The evolution of costly mate preferences. II. The "handicap' principle

Uses a general additive quantitative genetic model to study the evolution of costly female mate choice by the "handicap' principle. Two necessary conditions must be satisifed for costly preference to evolve. The conditions are 1) biased mutation pressure on viability and 2) a direct relationship between the degree of expression of the male mating character and viability. These two conditions explain the success and failure of previous models of the "handicap' principle. The model also applies to other sources of fitness variation like migration and host-parasite coevolution, which cause effects equivalent to biased mutation. -Authors