Victorian values and the censoring presence of his prudish daughter blinded Charles Darwin to female promiscuity and delayed the study of sperm competition for 100 years, says Tim Birkhead.
For a long time it was unclear how females could benefit from being unfaithful. Unlike males, who can potentially father dozens or even hundreds of offspring, the females of most species are limited in their reproductive output, so promiscuity is unlikely to increase the number of offspring they produce. Eventually, it was realised that by the careful choice of extra-pair partners, a female might increase the quality of her offspring, and studies of several different animals have since confirmed this.
I don't think Darwin thought this subject through. I don't think he ever thought carefully enough about the reproductive consequences of individual selection. As far as I can see, there isn't a hint of this kind of thinking in his voluminous correspondence. This is curious because the idea of female choice was such an integral (albeit controversial) component of his concept of sexual selection. For Darwin, mate choice simply stopped at copulation.
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