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Darwin's Comeback: A Ready-to-Teach Unit on Sexual Selection's Rehabilitation

A ready-to-use teaching module for psychology courses about the history of sexual selection.

A plug-in curriculum module — slides, primary-source reader, and exam bank — for psychology courses, built around the documented two-decade flip of sexual selection from Darwin's 'least successful idea' to the field's biggest success story.

PsychologyEvolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
Career Development and DiversityHigher-education publishing — evolutionary psychology and science-studies coursework

Concept

A ready-to-teach, two-week curriculum unit for evolutionary psychology, animal behavior, and history-of-science courses, built around a single dramatic arc that paper [0] documents: 20 years ago, many biologists considered sexual selection through mate choice Darwin's least successful idea — wrong, uninteresting, or even pathological — yet over the last two decades its application to human behavior has become what the review calls the greatest success story in evolutionary psychology. The unit packages this arc into lecture slides, a curated primary-source reader, structured debate prompts ('why did the field get this wrong for so long?'), and an exam bank. Its teaching goal, reinforced by paper [1]'s argument that theories shape society and must be assessed for validity, is theory-evaluation skill: students learn to judge frameworks on evidence rather than on current fashion. Delivered as a bundle for textbook publishers and course platforms; the wedge is one thing — a drop-in unit on how a ridiculed theory won.

Why now

Paper [0] is a current review that explicitly frames the 20-year reversal (from absurd to the field's biggest success), giving instructors an authoritative, citable anchor. Paper [1] provides the counterweight case: Erikson's psychosocial stages, developed in the early 1960s, remain in wide use essentially unchanged even as society has changed — showing students why 'old and familiar' is not an evidence status. Evolutionary psychology is a standard offering at most universities, and instructors consistently seek updated, debate-friendly material; the module requires no new research, only curation of an arc the review has already assembled.

Written by GLM · 10 Oct 2026

AI assessment

Backed by 2 papers73

A low-risk, low-moat content curation play that packages existing academic narratives into a teaching module for a niche academic market.

Evidence strength
4/5
The idea directly leverages the specific narrative arc described in the provided review paper [0] and uses paper [1] as a pedagogical counter-example.
Market pull
2/5
While the beneficiaries are real, textbook publishers rarely buy standalone two-week modules; they typically integrate such content into larger, comprehensive textbook revisions.
Novelty & moat
3/5
It is distinct from the listed catalog ideas, though it is essentially a manual curation of a known academic shift rather than a novel tool or methodology.
Feasibility
5/5
The MVP is simply a set of slides and a reading list, requiring no technical development and very little capital.
Wedge clarity
4/5
The 'drop-in unit' on the rehabilitation of sexual selection is a sharp, specific entry point for instructors.
Simplicity / focus
5/5
The product is highly focused on a single educational outcome without unnecessary platform bloat.

Scored by Gemma 4 · 10 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.

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Who benefits

  • Society for the Teaching of Psychology (APA Division 2)organization

    Distributes teaching resources to thousands of psychology instructors; a ready-made, debate-friendly unit on theory evaluation fits its mission directly.

  • W. W. Norton & Companycompany

    Publishes leading introductory psychology textbooks; a drop-in unit on the sexual-selection comeback refreshes its evolutionary-psychology chapters with a strong narrative hook.

  • Pearsoncompany

    Its digital courseware catalog can bundle the module with existing psychology courses at scale.

  • Courseracompany

    General-audience psychology courses thrive on comeback-story framing; the unit can anchor a new MOOC module.

Research it builds on

  1. How Mate Choice Shaped Human Nature: A Review of Sexual Selection and Human Evolution
    Geoffrey F. Miller · 2026 · 146 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
  2. THEORY AND DIVERSITY: A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF ERIKSON’S PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT STAGES
    Anastasiya Samsanovich · 2021 · 4 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
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feasibility