In this case, though, the reaction to her findings has been mixed. “A lot of people were very excited about it, other people were pissed about it. . . . It was like they were mad,” she tells me. When I e-mail Don Symons, who wrote The Evolution of Human Sexuality in 1979, to ask his opinion on Gowaty’s failure to replicate Bateman’s findings, he tells me he hasn’t read her paper. When I ask instead for his broader thoughts on the evidence of multiple mating in females, he tells me that he’s no longer available to answer my questions for personal reasons.
