Sexual signalling in an artificial population: When does the handicap principle work?

Abstract

Males may use sexual displays to signal their quality to females; the handicap principle provides a mechanism that could enforce honesty in such cases. Iwasa et al. [1] model the signalling of inherited male quality, and distinguish between three variants of the handicap principle: pure epistasis, conditional, and revealing. They argue that only the second and third will work. An evolutionary simulation is presented in which all three variants function under certain conditions; the assumptions made by Iwasa et al. are questioned.