Sexual Selection

What I learned last post: if a system is not driven by individual survival, it might instead be driven by sexual selection. A dioecious population will naturally tend towards anisogamy. Females by definition will have greater parental investment, which represents a limited, fought-over resource. So: an arrangement where female preference drives the male phenotype is reasonable and even expected.

So does that mean sex is incidental to natural selection? I understand now how it might arise, but there's no reason to contrive it unless it's being studied specifically, right?

(I need to handle any silly assumptions now so I won't have to code them later.)

I'm not so sure yet. A system like this is solving a different problem, one not of individual survival, but rather of genetic survival. But in terms of simulating models, it shouldn't matter whether I'm driving development through survival or sex. Whatever floats the boat.

But here's maybe what changes things: sexual selection automatically provides for coevolution! Not technically; you know what I mean. Changing pressures and adaptive goals. What Hillis did with anti-Ramps might be handled with this sort of dioecy.

A key difference between male/female and host/parasite, however, may be symmetry versus asymmetry. Dawkins briefly mentions this concept after his Red Queen sketch in The Blind Watchmaker:

"The arms race between cheetahs and gazelles, however, is asymmetric. It is a true arms race in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of success and failure on the two sides is very different... From an evolutionary point of view asymmetric arms races are more interesting, since they are more likely to generate highly complex weapons systems."

He likens asymmetrical arms races to missile versus signal-jamming technologies. Symmetrical races are more like two countries developing progressively bigger bombs.

So dioecy is asymmetric, or at least has its benefits. Good news. But what I'm really discussing here is inefficiency. Two types: peacocks developing extravagant tail displays, and nations developing costly technologies only to avoid falling behind. How do I deal with this possibility?