Dustin J. Penn

Dustin J. Penn

Dustin J. Penn is first author, with Szabolcs Számadó, of the 2020 review The Handicap Principle: how an erroneous hypothesis became a scientific principle, published in Biological Reviews.

Who they are

Penn is a biologist who wrote the review with Számadó. It appeared in Biological Reviews, volume 95, issue 1, 267-290, and was published online in 2019.

Key papers

Penn and Számadó (2020), The Handicap Principle: how an erroneous hypothesis became a scientific principle, Biological Reviews, 95(1), 267-290.

Key ideas

The review examines Zahavi's handicap principle, the idea that signals are honest because they are costly. Its authors argue that:

  • Zahavi's later ideas of waste and signal selection are logically flawed.
  • Alan Grafen's 1990 models support a different idea that Zahavi proposed in 1977, in which males adjust how much they invest in a signal according to their condition, which the authors call a trade-off model and not a handicap model.
  • The handicap principle became dominant through misinterpretation, and theoretical and empirical support for it is lacking.

Grafen's 1990 paper presents its own result as a vindication of Zahavi's main claims, so the two papers reach different readings of the same models.

Sources

  1. Penn, D. J., & Számadó, S. (2020). The Handicap Principle: how an erroneous hypothesis became a scientific principle. Biological Reviews, 95(1), 267-290. doi:10.1111/brv.12563 https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12563
  2. Grafen, A. (1990). Biological signals as handicaps. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 144(4), 517-546. doi:10.1016/S0022-5193(05)80088-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5193(05)80088-8
  3. Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection: A selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53(1), 205-214. doi:10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3