Dave Hone

There's almost certainly randomness going on in there as well.

And then the eye spots.

We know that eye spots are attractive, are probably encoded in some way.

But yeah, so going back to the sexy sons, the idea is females prefer something different for whatever reason.

And there might actually be some reasons females prefer things that are different.

Different usually means...

separate and outside and that usually comes with it variation like inherently also variation is evolutionary turn on yeah basically

Yeah, well, so you've got to remember, again, it's really easy to look at that sort of thing with a human perspective, where maximum reproductive output, I think the record, there's some obscure record, it's something like 66 children, which is probably apocryphal for a Russian woman who had loads of triplets and quads.

But like, humans don't have many offspring.

But most animals...

lay dozens of eggs or hundreds of eggs or thousands of eggs at a time so actually so diversity pays off more there so diversity can pay off we we think that's probably a major part of the reason that sex evolved in the first place is it gives you resistance to changing environment and it gives you resistance to parasites and diseases which often reproduce way faster than you do

You know, bacteria can divide in a few hours.

We reproduce every 20 years.

That's quite a difference.

If we were all asexual clones and you're vulnerable to some disease, you're probably going to get wiped out.

Look at the, you know, Irish potato famine or something like that.

So different may be appealing simply because it is different.

It's giving you variation.

And there's at least some evidence for that.

There's swordtails.