Among many animals, however, the females at first withdraw from the
males; they are coy, and have to be sought out, and sometimes held by
force. This tracking and grasping of the females by the males has
given rise to many different characters in the latter, as, for
instance, the larger eyes of the male bee, and especially of the males
of the Ephemerids (May-flies), some species of which show, in addition
to the usual compound eyes, large, so-called turban-eyes, so that the
whole head is covered with seeing surfaces. In these species the
females are very greatly in the minority (1-100), and it is easy to
understand that a keen competition for them must take place, and that,
when the insects of both sexes are floating freely in the air, an
unusually wide range of vision will carry with it a decided
advantage. Here again the actual adaptations are in accordance with
the preliminary postulates of the theory. We do not know the stages
through which the eye has passed to its present perfected state, but,
since the number of simple eyes (facets) has become very much greater
in the male than in the female, we may assume that their increase is
due to a gradual duplication of the determinants of the ommatidium in
the germ-plasm, as I have already indicated in regard to sense-organs
in general. In this case, again, the selection-value of the initial
stages hardly admits of doubt; better vision _directly_ secures
reproduction.
In many cases _the organ of smell_ shows a similar improvement. Many
lower Crustaceans (Daphnidae) have better developed organs of smell in
the male sex. The difference is often slight and amounts only to one
or two olfactory filaments, but certain species show a difference of
nearly a hundred of these filaments (Leptodora). The same thing occurs
among insects.
We must briefly consider the clasping or grasping organs which have
developed in the males among many lower Crustaceans, but here natural
selection plays its part along with sexual selection, for the union of
the sexes is an indispensable condition for the maintenance of the
species, and as Darwin himself pointed out, in many cases the two
forms of selection merge into each other. This fact has always seemed
to me to be a proof of natural selection, for, in regard to sexual
selection, it is quite obvious that the victory of the best-equipped
could have brought about the improvement only of the organs concerned,
the factors in the struggle, such as the eye and the olfactory organ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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