Are men really unfaithful by nature?
A new study has caused controversy in the postulates on which science relied to formulate the theory of sexual selection as it has been understood since 1948, points out the British newspaper The Daily Mail.
That's because researchers at the University of California, United States, reviewed an old study by English geneticist Angus John Bateman. The new findings are in line with the propositions previously presented and accepted worldwide for many years. Chief among them is the idea that men are naturally more likely to cheat while women pursue monogamy.
Led by Patricia Adair Gowarty, professor of ecology and biological evolution at the University of California, and with the help of advances in DNA analysis, the new study reveals that women can be as promiscuous as men.
Commonly, scientific discoveries are built on the analysis, refutation and reformulation of theories. However, the work of Angus Bateman was published more than 60 years ago without any researcher ever questioning his postulates.
Dr. Gowarty believes this is due to the fact that Bateman's findings were so comforting that, in order not to leave this comfort zone, people simply accepted his ideas without question.
Originally, Bateman's work was performed from fruit flies - three of each genus - isolated in a jar. The researcher examined the outcome of his breeding and began to outline theories about the behavior of males and females.
At a time when DNA analysis was not within reach, Bateman separated the insects that were born according to their common characteristics. After accounting for all the animals and cross-checking the results, the scholar concluded that male insects had bred more often and with more females. Females had the same number of pups with one or more males.
Thus, the idea was established that promiscuity and sexual infidelity are always among men. However, the study's coordinator points out that there is a fatal error in these findings and says to the Science Daily: "Bateman's study should never have been published."
To prove that the concepts demonstrated could be wrong, Patricia Gowarty and her team remade the same test used by Bateman, however, contact with advances in genetic analysis. One of the differences found is that many puppies mutated and had little chance of surviving. Thus, the researcher concludes that these insects may have died even before being accounted for by the English researcher. This makes the 1948 study totally lose its scientific value.
In addition, the research coordinator has spent the last 30 years studying blue jays - a bird species - and her findings indicate that in monogamous species, it is common for females to look for multiple partners. Patricia Gowarty believes this habit is a natural response to the need for survival - the biggest evolutionary challenge we face.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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