LAUSR

In 1948, British geneticist A. J. Bateman published in the journal Heredity the results of his experiments on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Bateman hoped he was bringing evidence for the ‘greater dependence of males for their fertility on frequency of insemination’ (Bateman, 1948, Heredity, 2(3), p. 364), thus purportedly explaining ‘an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females’ (p. 365). At first rather neglected, Bateman's results were increasingly cited in the 1970s, especially as Bateman had suggested that what he had discovered in Drosophila could also be applied to humans. However, throughout the years, criticisms of the paper accumulated to the point that biologists are now divided into two groups: those who praise Bateman as one of the founding fathers of the discipline of behavioural ecology, and those who claim his paper was fatally flawed. The present paper follows the ‘strange fate’ of Bateman's article: initially barely cited, the paper was ‘rediscovered’ by Robert Trivers in 1972 (Trivers, 1972, Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. G. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man: The Darwinian pivot, pp. 136–179, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers) and finally, the paper received numerous scathing critiques in more recent years, on a methodological and empirical basis.