Mating Signals, Including Advertisement and Courtship

Mating signals have evolved because the intended receivers find them attractive. They are the expression of sexual preferences encoded in the brain of agents, who have the freedom to choose their mates. Mating signals and mating preferences co-evolve and the process can be influenced by a plurality of mechanisms, such as perceptual biases, environmental selection, run-away sexual selection, good genes, and intra-sexual competition. These mechanisms may have different evolutionary effects, either favoring the evolution of arbitrary signals, which convey no other information than attractiveness itself, or promoting the evolution of signals that convey honest information about the benefits that choosers can obtain from signalers.