Sexual Selection in the French School of Population Genetics: Claudine Petit (1920–2007)

Abstract

This paper analyses Claudine Petit’s contributions to the experimental study of sexual selection. It examines the two sources of Petit’s work on the “advantage of the rare” in Drosophila melanogaster: the Tessier school of experimental genetics, with its methodology founded upon population cages, and the Dobzhansky/Mayr American school, which considered it mainly in relation with the problem of reproductive isolation. The evolution of Petit’s research is examined in detail, as well as the important role that her experimental work had in the issue of frequency-dependent selection. Petit’s final overtly non-adaptive interpretation of sexual selection is examined, in contrast with Dobzhansky’s conception.