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The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us
A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences--what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"--create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world.
In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature?
Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum--reviving Darwin's own views--thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons--for the mere pleasure of it--is an independent engine of evolutionary change.
Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time.
The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.
In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature?
Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum--reviving Darwin's own views--thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons--for the mere pleasure of it--is an independent engine of evolutionary change.
Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time.
The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published May 9, 2017
About the author
Richard O. Prum
6 books67 followersRichard O. Prum is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Prum describes himself as "an evolutionary ornithologist with broad interests in diverse topics," including phylogenetics, behavior, feathers, structural coloration, evolution and development, sexual selection, and historical biogeography. He has conducted field work throughout the world, and has studied fossil theropod dinosaurs in China. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 408 reviews
December 15, 2017
You have to make it past the 2/3rd of the book that’s about bird and duck sex to get to the part about why men have dangly penises. Not that the bird sex isn’t fascinating, but obviously I’m much more curious about human sex. This book was so interesting. Aesthetic beauty as an evolutionary force. I totally buy it. I read the Red Queen and some of the adaptation arguments for gaudy bird wings seemed crazy (like it was a signaling that the bird was so healthy that he could spare the extra plumage). This book is much more convincing. The plumage is there not because it’s a signal of health, but because the females like it. Read this book. Especially the penis parts
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December 3, 2019This is SUCH a great book. It made me do that annoying nonfiction reader thing where I was constantly telling my beleaguered family members all the cool facts I was learning. I'll be including more thoughts on it in a video, probably near the start of the year.
June 15, 2018
I am a little conflicted about this book.
Popular science books may be usefully divided into those with One Big Idea, and those with Many Small Ideas. Both are useful, but I typically judge them differently. If it's a "Many Small Ideas" book (e.g. a collection of essays), I am likely to judge it primarily on the writing style, as that is what is in common across the entire book (typically). Whereas, if it is a One Big Idea book, I am likely to judge it on the quality of that idea. Prum's writing style is, incidentally, very good.
This book's One Big Idea is, by the author's own admission, not one that originated with him. That's ok, though, because it is true to say that it has been a controversial, often neglected, and sometimes nearly suppressed idea. It is, I think, both important and contains a great deal of truth. So, you would think I would like this book, and by and large that is the case, I do like it.
However, I did get the impression at times, that Richard Prum was a little afraid to face the full implications of the idea he was writing about.
The idea in question, as far as I know first publicly raised in a serious way by Charles Darwin, is that of sexual selection as a driver for evolution. That is, the idea that evolution is not only driven by survival of the fittest, but also by survival of the most attractive. This may not seem so revolutionary, but in many ways it is just as explosive as the idea that markets price things not only owing to their relative merit, but that prices are also driven by irrational exuberance and fiscal bubbles.
Thus, for example, when looking at the extravagant plumage of the peacock, there are broadly speaking two theories:
1) the peacock that is otherwise fittest, can afford to produce the most extravagant tail feathers, so really the female is selecting for good genes for acquiring food and avoiding predators, and fancy tail feathers is just how she measures that.
2) the peahen just likes the peacock with the flashy feathers because she does, no real reason, but if she instead were to be the one peahen to pick the drab fellow who was a good father, her sons would never be able to reproduce, and thus peahens who go for impressive tail feathers get selected for because...well, no reason really. "Beauty". Not everything is about survival of the fittest. If you go for plain when the rest of your species does not, you will not have many grandkids.
Prum does a pretty efficient job of demolishing hypothesis (1), which I think it is fair to say is the more broadly supported theory. He asks, if peacocks just have big tail to show off that they can survive even with such a handicap, why don't they gnaw one leg off? That would be an even more impressive display of handicapping, if you manage to continue to survive, but we don't see that in nature, and if we did peahens would not respond favorably to it. There are all kinds of things that could be handicaps, and therefore evidence of how great you are to survive with such a handicap: pulling your plumage out, injuring yourself, etc. etc. But, we don't see just any kind of handicaps working, it has to be the specific kind of handicap that females in that species like (in the case of peafowl, showy tail feathers).
The problem with this is that, as with classical economics wanting to make everything about people optimizing for money, some evolutionary scientists want everything to be about natural selection (by survival of the fittest). Once you introduce a truly independent, second driver, you go from a linear system to a non-linear one, and you can get crazy results. Just as you can get economies stuck in sub-optimal states, or cycling through debt-fueled booms and busts, you could get species stuck in sub-optimal states, or cycling through long-term cycles of fashion in appearance and even courtship behavior, that don't particularly have anything to do with fitness.
After having established that Darwin's more complex ideas on evolution (not shared by Wallace, by the way) were correct, though, Prum shies away from the harsher possibilities. For example, when we look at the impact of people buying homes, not to live in, but as something to sell again later, it is clear that it can drive your economy into some bad places. There is no particular reason (that Prum explains, anyway) why sexual selection could not have the same issues for a species.
But, and here is my main issue with this book, Prum has conflated in his mind the idea that females of many species exercise choice, and the idea that human females should have choices in mate choice. He never says it so plainly, but you can get a clear sense in his writing that he just likes sexual selection better than conventionally understood natural selection, because it's about female choice and not about predation. I got the strong impression that he would have a visceral negative response to the idea that this could ever result in anything bad happening to the species, or that anything good could result for those species where females do not have as much choice.
It seems a fairly good example of the problem with having academia that is so overwhelmingly from one part of the political spectrum. Just as Victorian biologists (aside from Darwin) choked on the idea that sex and female mate choice could be an important driver of evolution, so Prum appears to be choking on the idea that those species where female mate choice is the main driver of evolution, could ever have anything bad result from that.
It doesn't have to be this way, not least because the way that human females choose their mates is not much like peahens; they often take into account aspects of the fellow's brain, such as personality and responsibility and whether he can hold down a good job. They don't all go for the fellow with the nice tail feathers (though of course some do). So, if mate choice as a driver of evolution is problematic for species fitness in, say, the Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock (a real bird species name, btw), that does not mean that female freedom of choice is not to be desired in humans. Because, while there are a lot of interesting parallels between birds and humans, there are also some nontrivial differences.
More fundamentally, whether or not an idea is comforting or reassuring is not a proper factor in influencing whether we explore the possibility that it is true. Prum has obviously done a lot of good work in demonstrating that evolution, and mate choice, is not just about fitness, traditionally defined. The book is well written, with many beautiful pictures and drawings, and more than a few fascinating discussions of different species courtship and mating habits (the chapter on ducks was equally amusing and disturbing, for example). It gave me a lot to think about, and for that reason alone it is worth reading. Even if I have the sneaking suspicion that Richard Prum's opponents are not the only ones that are uncomfortable with the possible consequences of his ideas.
Popular science books may be usefully divided into those with One Big Idea, and those with Many Small Ideas. Both are useful, but I typically judge them differently. If it's a "Many Small Ideas" book (e.g. a collection of essays), I am likely to judge it primarily on the writing style, as that is what is in common across the entire book (typically). Whereas, if it is a One Big Idea book, I am likely to judge it on the quality of that idea. Prum's writing style is, incidentally, very good.
This book's One Big Idea is, by the author's own admission, not one that originated with him. That's ok, though, because it is true to say that it has been a controversial, often neglected, and sometimes nearly suppressed idea. It is, I think, both important and contains a great deal of truth. So, you would think I would like this book, and by and large that is the case, I do like it.
However, I did get the impression at times, that Richard Prum was a little afraid to face the full implications of the idea he was writing about.
The idea in question, as far as I know first publicly raised in a serious way by Charles Darwin, is that of sexual selection as a driver for evolution. That is, the idea that evolution is not only driven by survival of the fittest, but also by survival of the most attractive. This may not seem so revolutionary, but in many ways it is just as explosive as the idea that markets price things not only owing to their relative merit, but that prices are also driven by irrational exuberance and fiscal bubbles.
Thus, for example, when looking at the extravagant plumage of the peacock, there are broadly speaking two theories:
1) the peacock that is otherwise fittest, can afford to produce the most extravagant tail feathers, so really the female is selecting for good genes for acquiring food and avoiding predators, and fancy tail feathers is just how she measures that.
2) the peahen just likes the peacock with the flashy feathers because she does, no real reason, but if she instead were to be the one peahen to pick the drab fellow who was a good father, her sons would never be able to reproduce, and thus peahens who go for impressive tail feathers get selected for because...well, no reason really. "Beauty". Not everything is about survival of the fittest. If you go for plain when the rest of your species does not, you will not have many grandkids.
Prum does a pretty efficient job of demolishing hypothesis (1), which I think it is fair to say is the more broadly supported theory. He asks, if peacocks just have big tail to show off that they can survive even with such a handicap, why don't they gnaw one leg off? That would be an even more impressive display of handicapping, if you manage to continue to survive, but we don't see that in nature, and if we did peahens would not respond favorably to it. There are all kinds of things that could be handicaps, and therefore evidence of how great you are to survive with such a handicap: pulling your plumage out, injuring yourself, etc. etc. But, we don't see just any kind of handicaps working, it has to be the specific kind of handicap that females in that species like (in the case of peafowl, showy tail feathers).
The problem with this is that, as with classical economics wanting to make everything about people optimizing for money, some evolutionary scientists want everything to be about natural selection (by survival of the fittest). Once you introduce a truly independent, second driver, you go from a linear system to a non-linear one, and you can get crazy results. Just as you can get economies stuck in sub-optimal states, or cycling through debt-fueled booms and busts, you could get species stuck in sub-optimal states, or cycling through long-term cycles of fashion in appearance and even courtship behavior, that don't particularly have anything to do with fitness.
After having established that Darwin's more complex ideas on evolution (not shared by Wallace, by the way) were correct, though, Prum shies away from the harsher possibilities. For example, when we look at the impact of people buying homes, not to live in, but as something to sell again later, it is clear that it can drive your economy into some bad places. There is no particular reason (that Prum explains, anyway) why sexual selection could not have the same issues for a species.
But, and here is my main issue with this book, Prum has conflated in his mind the idea that females of many species exercise choice, and the idea that human females should have choices in mate choice. He never says it so plainly, but you can get a clear sense in his writing that he just likes sexual selection better than conventionally understood natural selection, because it's about female choice and not about predation. I got the strong impression that he would have a visceral negative response to the idea that this could ever result in anything bad happening to the species, or that anything good could result for those species where females do not have as much choice.
It seems a fairly good example of the problem with having academia that is so overwhelmingly from one part of the political spectrum. Just as Victorian biologists (aside from Darwin) choked on the idea that sex and female mate choice could be an important driver of evolution, so Prum appears to be choking on the idea that those species where female mate choice is the main driver of evolution, could ever have anything bad result from that.
It doesn't have to be this way, not least because the way that human females choose their mates is not much like peahens; they often take into account aspects of the fellow's brain, such as personality and responsibility and whether he can hold down a good job. They don't all go for the fellow with the nice tail feathers (though of course some do). So, if mate choice as a driver of evolution is problematic for species fitness in, say, the Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock (a real bird species name, btw), that does not mean that female freedom of choice is not to be desired in humans. Because, while there are a lot of interesting parallels between birds and humans, there are also some nontrivial differences.
More fundamentally, whether or not an idea is comforting or reassuring is not a proper factor in influencing whether we explore the possibility that it is true. Prum has obviously done a lot of good work in demonstrating that evolution, and mate choice, is not just about fitness, traditionally defined. The book is well written, with many beautiful pictures and drawings, and more than a few fascinating discussions of different species courtship and mating habits (the chapter on ducks was equally amusing and disturbing, for example). It gave me a lot to think about, and for that reason alone it is worth reading. Even if I have the sneaking suspicion that Richard Prum's opponents are not the only ones that are uncomfortable with the possible consequences of his ideas.
January 24, 2018
Over the years, I've interviewed Prum several times for various articles about birds--from the way some birds can sing with their wing feathers to the baroque sexual anatomy of ducks. In those interviews, the conversation would sometimes take us into short digressions about his big ideas about beauty. Finally, when Prum published this book, I could take them in as one long--and fascinating--argument. Here's the blurb I gave it:
"Life isn't just a dreary slog of survival. It brims with exuberance--from extravagant plumage to strange courtship rituals. In The Evolution of Beauty, Richard Prum takes into this universe of delights to discover a fascinating idea: that beauty is central to the history of life."
"Life isn't just a dreary slog of survival. It brims with exuberance--from extravagant plumage to strange courtship rituals. In The Evolution of Beauty, Richard Prum takes into this universe of delights to discover a fascinating idea: that beauty is central to the history of life."
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January 15, 2022Two words: duck sex.
Just kidding here’s some more words:
This was such a fascinating take on beauty and its evolution among birds and these relations to other primates, including human beings.
My father read this and after describing the fascinating sexual evolution among DUCKS I was sold. Seriously it’s wild. Male ducks are violent and rape other ducks. Female ducks have evolved to combat this behavior through a “steeplechase vagina.” Basically a corkscrew-like vagina that makes it difficult for the male duck’s super long penis to penetrate the female duck. That's freaking epic. Richard O. Prum compares different kinds of animals and their sexual behavior and aesthetic evolution to how human beings have interacted and evolved over time.
I’m going to need my own copy of this book to mark it up for myself (because there’s just so much) but here are a few bullet points I was able to gather:
-Ducks are dope. And among many kinds of birds the female bird is usually the one who takes charge. She only needs the male for his sperm and then…well that’s it.
-Our perception of beauty changes over time but it is deeply rooted in aesthetic evolution and the strength of our offspring.
-Studies have shown that women prefer a more moderate degree of masculinity (commonly men with more feminine traits) as opposed to more “hard-core” masculine traits for sexual progress and pleasure.
-Viewing the story of Adam and Eve from an evolutionary perspective shows that instead of forming Eve from the rib of Adam, God could have formed Eve from a baculum, a penis bone, found in all primates except spider monkeys and ourselves.
-Studies have shown that homosexual relationships have decreased competition and abuse among couples (heterosexual and not). There is also an interesting correlation of the progression and evolution of female sexual autonomy to same-sex relationships (romantic and platonic) among males and females.
-The difference of sexual pleasure among males and females was compared to the Greek story of Tiresias who transformed into a woman after kicking copulating snakes. He turned back into a man after kicking those snakes again. When asked which gender received more sexual pleasure he replied that women received 9 times more pleasure than men. Nine is a powerful number used to indicate divine completeness or finality. We already know women are more susceptible to a more prolonged and varied degree of sexual pleasure than men, but comparing that fact to that Greek story was so cool.
Prum did a fantastic job describing the research that was dedicated to understanding the evolution of beauty. He compares evolution to social issues in such a fascinating way as well. This book is very accessible and I was engaged from beginning to end.
Just kidding here’s some more words:
This was such a fascinating take on beauty and its evolution among birds and these relations to other primates, including human beings.
My father read this and after describing the fascinating sexual evolution among DUCKS I was sold. Seriously it’s wild. Male ducks are violent and rape other ducks. Female ducks have evolved to combat this behavior through a “steeplechase vagina.” Basically a corkscrew-like vagina that makes it difficult for the male duck’s super long penis to penetrate the female duck. That's freaking epic. Richard O. Prum compares different kinds of animals and their sexual behavior and aesthetic evolution to how human beings have interacted and evolved over time.
I’m going to need my own copy of this book to mark it up for myself (because there’s just so much) but here are a few bullet points I was able to gather:
-Ducks are dope. And among many kinds of birds the female bird is usually the one who takes charge. She only needs the male for his sperm and then…well that’s it.
-Our perception of beauty changes over time but it is deeply rooted in aesthetic evolution and the strength of our offspring.
-Studies have shown that women prefer a more moderate degree of masculinity (commonly men with more feminine traits) as opposed to more “hard-core” masculine traits for sexual progress and pleasure.
-Viewing the story of Adam and Eve from an evolutionary perspective shows that instead of forming Eve from the rib of Adam, God could have formed Eve from a baculum, a penis bone, found in all primates except spider monkeys and ourselves.
-Studies have shown that homosexual relationships have decreased competition and abuse among couples (heterosexual and not). There is also an interesting correlation of the progression and evolution of female sexual autonomy to same-sex relationships (romantic and platonic) among males and females.
-The difference of sexual pleasure among males and females was compared to the Greek story of Tiresias who transformed into a woman after kicking copulating snakes. He turned back into a man after kicking those snakes again. When asked which gender received more sexual pleasure he replied that women received 9 times more pleasure than men. Nine is a powerful number used to indicate divine completeness or finality. We already know women are more susceptible to a more prolonged and varied degree of sexual pleasure than men, but comparing that fact to that Greek story was so cool.
Prum did a fantastic job describing the research that was dedicated to understanding the evolution of beauty. He compares evolution to social issues in such a fascinating way as well. This book is very accessible and I was engaged from beginning to end.
June 8, 2017
Great until the last two chapters, then some slippage
This book is worth five stars for two starter reasons alone.
One is the sheer depth and breadth of Prum's speculative intelligence, especially in getting back to what he rightly postulates was Darwin's original stance on sexual selection.
The second is the number of swift kicks he rightly gives Ev Psychers.
Beyond that, I think he's largely, and refreshingly, right on Darwin's take, and on how it plays out today with much more field studies not only in birds, which Darwin surely would have loved, but in other primates and ultimately in Homo sapiens.
That said, even iat five stars, I can quibble.
The last two chapters are speculative and the last is also somewhat politicized even beyond the intellectual judo on Ev Psychers.
First, the chapter on same-sex relationships in humans, ironically, given the rest of Prum's book, comes close to making adaptationist claims, though Prum would deny it.
Second, Prum ignores the broadness of same-sex relationships in other mammals and in birds, and acts almost as if it's de novo in humans, and of course he knows it's not.
Third, he doesn't ask if "gay" relationships, whether in humans, or other animals, are more common than "lesbian" ones. (It seems to be the case in humans.)
Nor does he ask if mammals', and especially humans', stumpy Y chromosome, along with womb environmental factors, doesn't contributed to gay sexuality being nonadaptive from a natural selection POV, but not so nonadaptive as to eliminate itself. (Given the reversed sex chromosomes in birds, lesbian sex studies there, especially of birds with the most decayed Y's, would be interesting indeed.)
The last chapter? I agree to a fair degree with critiques — whether about patriarchy or private property — on the rise of agriculture, etc. But, the coevolution of cultural evolution and natural selection itself is speculative enough; cultural evolution and sexual selection even more so. Plus, the pre-agricultural world wasn't all that.
All of this together? Sorry, but you lost a star.
This book is worth five stars for two starter reasons alone.
One is the sheer depth and breadth of Prum's speculative intelligence, especially in getting back to what he rightly postulates was Darwin's original stance on sexual selection.
The second is the number of swift kicks he rightly gives Ev Psychers.
Beyond that, I think he's largely, and refreshingly, right on Darwin's take, and on how it plays out today with much more field studies not only in birds, which Darwin surely would have loved, but in other primates and ultimately in Homo sapiens.
That said, even iat five stars, I can quibble.
The last two chapters are speculative and the last is also somewhat politicized even beyond the intellectual judo on Ev Psychers.
First, the chapter on same-sex relationships in humans, ironically, given the rest of Prum's book, comes close to making adaptationist claims, though Prum would deny it.
Second, Prum ignores the broadness of same-sex relationships in other mammals and in birds, and acts almost as if it's de novo in humans, and of course he knows it's not.
Third, he doesn't ask if "gay" relationships, whether in humans, or other animals, are more common than "lesbian" ones. (It seems to be the case in humans.)
Nor does he ask if mammals', and especially humans', stumpy Y chromosome, along with womb environmental factors, doesn't contributed to gay sexuality being nonadaptive from a natural selection POV, but not so nonadaptive as to eliminate itself. (Given the reversed sex chromosomes in birds, lesbian sex studies there, especially of birds with the most decayed Y's, would be interesting indeed.)
The last chapter? I agree to a fair degree with critiques — whether about patriarchy or private property — on the rise of agriculture, etc. But, the coevolution of cultural evolution and natural selection itself is speculative enough; cultural evolution and sexual selection even more so. Plus, the pre-agricultural world wasn't all that.
All of this together? Sorry, but you lost a star.
January 8, 2018
Um livro um tanto controverso perto de outros que costumo ler. Prum trabalhou com preferência sexual em aves e trás uma perspectiva bem diferente para o tema. Primeiro por sugerir algo que acho bem razoável, que a hipótese nula em seleção sexual deveria ser assumir que as fêmeas preferem algo simplesmente por preferirem, sem nenhum julgamento além do estético. E que deveríamos provar quando ela está selecionando genes mais saudáveis ao fazer isso. Ao invés do contrário, que muitos fazem hoje, de assumir que qualquer escolha estética envolve bons genes por trás, a não ser que provemos o contrário.
Segundo Prum, Darwin propôs que a seleção sexual seria diferente da seleção natural, por depender bem mais de critérios estéticos por parte das fêmeas. E Wallace e outros teriam questionado como fêmeas poderiam ter algum critério (e liberdade) de escolha. E em pouco tempo o campo da evolução assumiu essa equivalência entre seleção natural e seleção sexual, considerando que qualquer escolha de uma característica envolve escolher genes mais saudáveis por trás, o que seria seleção natural pura.
Compro muito essa ideia de que ainda temos um olhar muito finalista para seleção sexual, o que o Fischer já tinha questionado há bastante tempo e foi meio que deixado de lado por bastante gente. Fico um pouco reticente com as próximas ideias que ele coloca no livro em seguida, propondo que a consequência da seleção estética pelas fêmeas de aves é dar mais controle reprodutivo e sujeitá-las menos à estupro. Para depois propor que o mesmo pode ter acontecido em humanos, que seleção sexual poderia ter ajudado na nossa domesticação, reduzindo tamanho de presas, diferença de tamanho entre os sexos e outras caraterísticas que geram mais opressão reprodutiva das fêmeas. São ideias interessantes, mas que até agora nunca tinha lido, para as quais gostaria muito de ler contrapontos.
Segundo Prum, Darwin propôs que a seleção sexual seria diferente da seleção natural, por depender bem mais de critérios estéticos por parte das fêmeas. E Wallace e outros teriam questionado como fêmeas poderiam ter algum critério (e liberdade) de escolha. E em pouco tempo o campo da evolução assumiu essa equivalência entre seleção natural e seleção sexual, considerando que qualquer escolha de uma característica envolve escolher genes mais saudáveis por trás, o que seria seleção natural pura.
Compro muito essa ideia de que ainda temos um olhar muito finalista para seleção sexual, o que o Fischer já tinha questionado há bastante tempo e foi meio que deixado de lado por bastante gente. Fico um pouco reticente com as próximas ideias que ele coloca no livro em seguida, propondo que a consequência da seleção estética pelas fêmeas de aves é dar mais controle reprodutivo e sujeitá-las menos à estupro. Para depois propor que o mesmo pode ter acontecido em humanos, que seleção sexual poderia ter ajudado na nossa domesticação, reduzindo tamanho de presas, diferença de tamanho entre os sexos e outras caraterísticas que geram mais opressão reprodutiva das fêmeas. São ideias interessantes, mas que até agora nunca tinha lido, para as quais gostaria muito de ler contrapontos.
May 28, 2019
The Evolution of Beauty is utterly fascinating. It puts forth the notion that evolution is not all due to natural selection, where every mating display is an honest signal of genetic superiority. Rather, there is a separate force at work--aesthetic evolution of mate choice--which created a lot of the ornaments and behaviors we see in the animal world today.
Prum makes his arguments via interesting narratives about birds, ducks, and humans. I found it useful to look up bird displays as he talks about them so I can see and hear for myself the complex shows that they put on. Going in, I thought I would be learning about an abstract concept, so I was surprised by how much of what I'm reading applies to our lives today, including sexual coercion, females' right to make reproductive choices, and sexual conflict between the sexes.
For such a technical topic, I found the book mostly readable and digestible. The initial two chapters were a bit slow as Prum talks about the history of evolutionary science and puts forth his views. But if you can tough it out through those, then you get to the meat of it with chapter three, and it's completely mesmerizing from there on out.
Prum makes his arguments via interesting narratives about birds, ducks, and humans. I found it useful to look up bird displays as he talks about them so I can see and hear for myself the complex shows that they put on. Going in, I thought I would be learning about an abstract concept, so I was surprised by how much of what I'm reading applies to our lives today, including sexual coercion, females' right to make reproductive choices, and sexual conflict between the sexes.
For such a technical topic, I found the book mostly readable and digestible. The initial two chapters were a bit slow as Prum talks about the history of evolutionary science and puts forth his views. But if you can tough it out through those, then you get to the meat of it with chapter three, and it's completely mesmerizing from there on out.
January 16, 2019
this book is a mess.
there seems to today exist an opinion among publishers that the general public are not interested in 'popular science' books without some kind of edge. every theory discussed must be groundbreaking, or controversial, or newly rediscovered (with a third of the book being about the scandalous tale of why it was ignored for so long in the first place!).
when authors yield and try better fit these desirable narratives the content always suffers. the evolution of beauty reads at certain points as though it has undergone a hack and slash rewrite, perhaps starting life as a manuscript about aesthetic innovation in birds that made few bold claims. despite some interesting content and decent writing (prum's lifelong obsession with and passion for birds shines through) this book is ultimately is an unfortunate casualty of publisher demands for sexier science.
even the title is misleading in two regards; this is not really a book totally about the evolution of beauty, and sexual selection has certainly not been "forgotten" in the scientific community.
the science suffers. examining sexual selection and mate choice as processes distinct from natural selection doesn't make sense for any reason other than to further some of his arguments. the chapter about human sexuality grabs attention but is genuinely ridiculous in places. his proposed explanation for the evolution of the female orgasm could not possibly be selected for!
bad science aside, prum is also guilty of what i can only term "social-justice washing". he makes the bizarre claim that his theory of aesthetic evolution disproves eugenics(?) and that it supports feminism as a sort of natural cultural tool. such appeals to nature are downright dangerous and extremely irresponsible for a man of his position to make. progressive social movements can just as easily be attacked by opponents with references to biology. it is a cynical move by an author who desires to seem socially aware which inadvertently shows his disregard.
the chapter about forced copulation in waterfowl and the three chapters about manikins were genuinely extremely good tho. two stars.
there seems to today exist an opinion among publishers that the general public are not interested in 'popular science' books without some kind of edge. every theory discussed must be groundbreaking, or controversial, or newly rediscovered (with a third of the book being about the scandalous tale of why it was ignored for so long in the first place!).
when authors yield and try better fit these desirable narratives the content always suffers. the evolution of beauty reads at certain points as though it has undergone a hack and slash rewrite, perhaps starting life as a manuscript about aesthetic innovation in birds that made few bold claims. despite some interesting content and decent writing (prum's lifelong obsession with and passion for birds shines through) this book is ultimately is an unfortunate casualty of publisher demands for sexier science.
even the title is misleading in two regards; this is not really a book totally about the evolution of beauty, and sexual selection has certainly not been "forgotten" in the scientific community.
the science suffers. examining sexual selection and mate choice as processes distinct from natural selection doesn't make sense for any reason other than to further some of his arguments. the chapter about human sexuality grabs attention but is genuinely ridiculous in places. his proposed explanation for the evolution of the female orgasm could not possibly be selected for!
bad science aside, prum is also guilty of what i can only term "social-justice washing". he makes the bizarre claim that his theory of aesthetic evolution disproves eugenics(?) and that it supports feminism as a sort of natural cultural tool. such appeals to nature are downright dangerous and extremely irresponsible for a man of his position to make. progressive social movements can just as easily be attacked by opponents with references to biology. it is a cynical move by an author who desires to seem socially aware which inadvertently shows his disregard.
the chapter about forced copulation in waterfowl and the three chapters about manikins were genuinely extremely good tho. two stars.
January 28, 2021
16 of the world's most psychedelic creatures:
https://www.treehugger.com/worlds-mos...
Darwin realized there were two different types of selection in evolution: natural selection and sexual selection. Why are there red male cardinals when it is so dangerous? It can attract predators. The author shows how beauty can be a part of the choice. Opposition comes from die hard natural selection purists only who support the ideas of Russell Wallace. They think the red cardinal shows better genes because he has survived. But sexual selection means the female may have chosen him because of the response the red color made in her brain. In other words, beauty.
Opposition can also come from feminists who tend to downplay beauty. The author makes the point that the beauty choice is a chance for female sexual autonomy rather than male sexual coercion.
For example, my dimples are not going to help me in a barroom brawl. If I am fighting with a biker dude in a bar, my dimples are not going to distract him so I can sucker punch him. But they work wonders on females. Look, I'm not bragging. Just doing straight science here. Facts.
Here is a famous Saturday Night Live skit mentioned in the book about Smuckers, which is such an awful name for a jam it must be good, just like the red cardinal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht7Jm...
The book involves not only plant and animal sex, but human as well, including homosexuality. There is more sex talk than you could get spending a year in a bordello. Not that I would know, of course, and not that you would want to spend a year in a bordello, although you have to admit it would be quite a year.
Nature is a balance between sexual and natural selection. Patriarchal societies tend to subvert female sexual pleasure. It is time to speak out against that and stop worrying about offending someone's religion.
A must read for all those interested in evolution.
https://www.treehugger.com/worlds-mos...
Darwin realized there were two different types of selection in evolution: natural selection and sexual selection. Why are there red male cardinals when it is so dangerous? It can attract predators. The author shows how beauty can be a part of the choice. Opposition comes from die hard natural selection purists only who support the ideas of Russell Wallace. They think the red cardinal shows better genes because he has survived. But sexual selection means the female may have chosen him because of the response the red color made in her brain. In other words, beauty.
Opposition can also come from feminists who tend to downplay beauty. The author makes the point that the beauty choice is a chance for female sexual autonomy rather than male sexual coercion.
For example, my dimples are not going to help me in a barroom brawl. If I am fighting with a biker dude in a bar, my dimples are not going to distract him so I can sucker punch him. But they work wonders on females. Look, I'm not bragging. Just doing straight science here. Facts.
Here is a famous Saturday Night Live skit mentioned in the book about Smuckers, which is such an awful name for a jam it must be good, just like the red cardinal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht7Jm...
The book involves not only plant and animal sex, but human as well, including homosexuality. There is more sex talk than you could get spending a year in a bordello. Not that I would know, of course, and not that you would want to spend a year in a bordello, although you have to admit it would be quite a year.
Nature is a balance between sexual and natural selection. Patriarchal societies tend to subvert female sexual pleasure. It is time to speak out against that and stop worrying about offending someone's religion.
A must read for all those interested in evolution.
May 1, 2022
I'm about a quarter of the way in, and I've liked his argument and some of the anecdotes. Skimming ahead, it looks like a lot of reiteration coming up, plus more bird stories. He writes well, but I just don't care that much about the mainstream view vs. Prum's revival of Darwin's female choice in mating. Likely the truth lies somewhere between the two views. 2.5 stars, maybe.
The book is coming due at the library, and I doubt I'll return to it. Caveat lector.
Here's a good critical review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... [dead link]
And here's the review that led me to read it:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-only...
"Richard Prum’s “The Evolution of Beauty” is a book to wrestle with. It includes plenty of well-wrought scenes—tales from the author’s boyhood birdwatching days, or the story of his lab getting pilloried on Fox News for a $385,000 study on duck genitalia. But above all it focuses on one idea: that beauty drives much of evolution. And even when the details aren’t quite convincing, the argument is exhilarating."
The book is coming due at the library, and I doubt I'll return to it. Caveat lector.
Here's a good critical review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... [dead link]
And here's the review that led me to read it:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-only...
"Richard Prum’s “The Evolution of Beauty” is a book to wrestle with. It includes plenty of well-wrought scenes—tales from the author’s boyhood birdwatching days, or the story of his lab getting pilloried on Fox News for a $385,000 study on duck genitalia. But above all it focuses on one idea: that beauty drives much of evolution. And even when the details aren’t quite convincing, the argument is exhilarating."
January 19, 2022
The Evolution of Beauty – Richard O. Prum. Anchor Books, 428 pages.
I had high hopes for this book and was sadly disappointed. I’d hoped to find a readable work to recommend to my students in Evolutionary Psychology on the fascinating topic of sexual selection, but I’m afraid I can’t recommend this book to anyone. To be fair, the writing is adequate and even elegant in places, and there is some good science in the book in the chapters where Prum talks about birds, which is his field. However, he begins the book with a straw man argument and then beats it like the proverbial dead horse throughout the entire manuscript, getting more and more strident with his attacks as the work continues.
His straw man is his statement that basically every evolutionary scientist in the world except for himself and a few others support purely and only an adaptationist viewpoint of every element of evolution for both animals and humans, meaning that they solely argue for a natural selection viewpoint of evolution and completely ignore sexual selection (or anything else) as a moving force.
This is wholly untrue. All evolutionists that I’m familiar with accept such concepts as genetic drift and extinction events as having profound impact on evolutionary patterns while not involving natural selection at all. Prum makes no mention of these concepts. I understand that these ideas are not his focus in the book but the widespread acknowledgement of them shows the fallacy of his straw man argument.
Working at a small university as I do, I’m somewhat outside the mainstream of evolution debate but I’ve also talked to plenty of other scientists who accept a non natural selection role for sexual selection. I’ve been teaching a class in evolutionary psychology since before it was called that and I’ve never scrimped on discussing the powers of sexual selection to sometimes even work against what natural selection might be expected to produce. Considering whether or not there are “predictors” of good health that lie beneath the sexual selection of features is legitimate work and shouldn’t be demonized.
Prum goes further, though. He even goes so far as to call the “traditional” view (natural selection is everything) “faith-based” thinking rather than true science, firmly aligning himself on this point with creationist attacks on science as a whole. He should know better, particularly since the traditional view as he describes it (his straw man) does not exist. No doubt, there are individual scientists who believe something very similar to what Prum describes, but it is not the field as a whole. And some scientists may take this “straw man” view to an extreme as a way of probing into evolutionary theory—a legitimate technique.
Another inexplicable aspect of this book is Prum’s continuous and rather relentless and strangely emotional attacks on the field of “Evolutionary Psychology.” These scientists are, in Prum’s viewpoint, the most egregious sinners of orthodoxy, seeking to explain every human behavior and physical characteristic as a product of the one and only natural selection.
I believe my mouth did indeed drop open a few times as I read some of his attacks. I can’t imagine what evolutionary psychologists he might be talking about. I’ve never taught my classes in such a fashion. Surely, no scientist who understands evolution would deny the very possibility that sexual selection can work against natural selection under some circumstances. As Prum indicates, and as I remember clearly from reading Darwin’s original work, sexual selection has its own power and most evolutionists know and respect this. We also all know that characters and traits are under varying degrees of selection, that sometimes traits vary together genetically in which only one of the traits is actually naturally selected, and that—in humans—culture has tremendous power and can work against natural selection.
I have no idea why Prum dislikes evolutionary psychologists so much but it’s hard not to imagine that someone in the field once did him a harm and he’s lashing out emotionally. And I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset as an evolutionary psychologist by his attacks since at the end of the book he accuses all of evolutionary biology of still being mired within the language of the eugenics movement, a horror that only his idea of aesthetic mate choice can save them from.
Another accusation that Prum levels against the “orthodoxy” early in his book is that “they” tell far too many “just so” stories, which is too often speculation run riot. Just so stories are a potential problem in evolutionary science because we can’t go back and observe evolutionary changes in real time. However, as long as they are labeled as speculation, such conceptualizations can be relevant and even useful. The worst part here, though, is that while Prum attacks speculation early in the book by other scientists, the last few chapters of his book are almost outrageously speculative. With no apologies. Personally, I didn’t mind the speculations. I think they are fine to engage in as long as they are labeled as such. What I reject is the right of Prum to speculate while he abhors it in others.
If you’ve gotten this far in my review, you can probably tell that I was emotionally angered myself by Prum’s approach. That’s why I made sure to read his entire book rather than reject it early on when his arguments became clear to me. I read it slowly and critically, and waited to do my review until I was able to reread my own words with a calm mind. Prum does make some points in his work that are useful. I do believe his concept of aesthetic mate choice has merit. In fact, I already believed that it did, which is why I picked up this book in the first place. I just wish he had focused on those positives rather than lash out in every direction at almost the whole of evolutionary science with incorrect and culturally dangerous accusations.
I had high hopes for this book and was sadly disappointed. I’d hoped to find a readable work to recommend to my students in Evolutionary Psychology on the fascinating topic of sexual selection, but I’m afraid I can’t recommend this book to anyone. To be fair, the writing is adequate and even elegant in places, and there is some good science in the book in the chapters where Prum talks about birds, which is his field. However, he begins the book with a straw man argument and then beats it like the proverbial dead horse throughout the entire manuscript, getting more and more strident with his attacks as the work continues.
His straw man is his statement that basically every evolutionary scientist in the world except for himself and a few others support purely and only an adaptationist viewpoint of every element of evolution for both animals and humans, meaning that they solely argue for a natural selection viewpoint of evolution and completely ignore sexual selection (or anything else) as a moving force.
This is wholly untrue. All evolutionists that I’m familiar with accept such concepts as genetic drift and extinction events as having profound impact on evolutionary patterns while not involving natural selection at all. Prum makes no mention of these concepts. I understand that these ideas are not his focus in the book but the widespread acknowledgement of them shows the fallacy of his straw man argument.
Working at a small university as I do, I’m somewhat outside the mainstream of evolution debate but I’ve also talked to plenty of other scientists who accept a non natural selection role for sexual selection. I’ve been teaching a class in evolutionary psychology since before it was called that and I’ve never scrimped on discussing the powers of sexual selection to sometimes even work against what natural selection might be expected to produce. Considering whether or not there are “predictors” of good health that lie beneath the sexual selection of features is legitimate work and shouldn’t be demonized.
Prum goes further, though. He even goes so far as to call the “traditional” view (natural selection is everything) “faith-based” thinking rather than true science, firmly aligning himself on this point with creationist attacks on science as a whole. He should know better, particularly since the traditional view as he describes it (his straw man) does not exist. No doubt, there are individual scientists who believe something very similar to what Prum describes, but it is not the field as a whole. And some scientists may take this “straw man” view to an extreme as a way of probing into evolutionary theory—a legitimate technique.
Another inexplicable aspect of this book is Prum’s continuous and rather relentless and strangely emotional attacks on the field of “Evolutionary Psychology.” These scientists are, in Prum’s viewpoint, the most egregious sinners of orthodoxy, seeking to explain every human behavior and physical characteristic as a product of the one and only natural selection.
I believe my mouth did indeed drop open a few times as I read some of his attacks. I can’t imagine what evolutionary psychologists he might be talking about. I’ve never taught my classes in such a fashion. Surely, no scientist who understands evolution would deny the very possibility that sexual selection can work against natural selection under some circumstances. As Prum indicates, and as I remember clearly from reading Darwin’s original work, sexual selection has its own power and most evolutionists know and respect this. We also all know that characters and traits are under varying degrees of selection, that sometimes traits vary together genetically in which only one of the traits is actually naturally selected, and that—in humans—culture has tremendous power and can work against natural selection.
I have no idea why Prum dislikes evolutionary psychologists so much but it’s hard not to imagine that someone in the field once did him a harm and he’s lashing out emotionally. And I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset as an evolutionary psychologist by his attacks since at the end of the book he accuses all of evolutionary biology of still being mired within the language of the eugenics movement, a horror that only his idea of aesthetic mate choice can save them from.
Another accusation that Prum levels against the “orthodoxy” early in his book is that “they” tell far too many “just so” stories, which is too often speculation run riot. Just so stories are a potential problem in evolutionary science because we can’t go back and observe evolutionary changes in real time. However, as long as they are labeled as speculation, such conceptualizations can be relevant and even useful. The worst part here, though, is that while Prum attacks speculation early in the book by other scientists, the last few chapters of his book are almost outrageously speculative. With no apologies. Personally, I didn’t mind the speculations. I think they are fine to engage in as long as they are labeled as such. What I reject is the right of Prum to speculate while he abhors it in others.
If you’ve gotten this far in my review, you can probably tell that I was emotionally angered myself by Prum’s approach. That’s why I made sure to read his entire book rather than reject it early on when his arguments became clear to me. I read it slowly and critically, and waited to do my review until I was able to reread my own words with a calm mind. Prum does make some points in his work that are useful. I do believe his concept of aesthetic mate choice has merit. In fact, I already believed that it did, which is why I picked up this book in the first place. I just wish he had focused on those positives rather than lash out in every direction at almost the whole of evolutionary science with incorrect and culturally dangerous accusations.
May 17, 2019
An excellent book seeking to revive Darwin’s hypothesis in
Descent of Man
that female sexual autonomy is an evolutionary force, occupying a separate sphere from that of adaptive mate choice. Darwin originally posited two aspects to his theory of sexual selection: first, that aggression evolved to increase the survival of contenders in male-to-male competition for mates, and secondly—perhaps more saliently—the female preference for beauty (“the taste for the beautiful”) drives aesthetic evolution in males. His theory was vehemently denounced by his contemporaries, in part because it was deeply at odds with the Victorian cultural milieu.
One critic Mivart argued that animals lacked the cognitive capacity, free will, and sensory powers to make sexual decisions based on ornamentation. Underlying this was the implicit belief female choice could not drive such order and structure as the peacock’s tail, that female preference was far too fickle to have a concerted effect. Such detractors also felt that the mate choice theory of sexual selection was a dilution of Darwin’s comprehensive theory of evolution; thus, a stain on his legacy. He remained persuaded of his theory of sexual selection up until his death.
In contradiction to the Wallacean adaptationist view of evolution—which holds the sexual ornaments evolved only as authentic indices of quality—the authentically Darwinian view accepts the contingent character of beauty. Beauty is not sought for its adaptive, utilitarian value, but as a value in and of itself.
Many popular ideas are contested in this book. Despite widespread opinion to the contrary, females seem to not be attracted to extremely masculine traits. Instead, it is hypothesized that such hyper-masculine features arose due to male-to-male competition. Through female mate choice, men have actually evolved to social cooperation and reduced aggressiveness.
Finally, the last chapter makes an intriguing connection between eugenics and the obsession with adaptive improvement, since eugenic social programs were explicitly anti-aesthetic.
Aesthetic choice and adaptive mate choice are often opposed. Sexual autonomy drives the production of the beautiful, motivating aesthetic evolution via sexual selection.
One critic Mivart argued that animals lacked the cognitive capacity, free will, and sensory powers to make sexual decisions based on ornamentation. Underlying this was the implicit belief female choice could not drive such order and structure as the peacock’s tail, that female preference was far too fickle to have a concerted effect. Such detractors also felt that the mate choice theory of sexual selection was a dilution of Darwin’s comprehensive theory of evolution; thus, a stain on his legacy. He remained persuaded of his theory of sexual selection up until his death.
In contradiction to the Wallacean adaptationist view of evolution—which holds the sexual ornaments evolved only as authentic indices of quality—the authentically Darwinian view accepts the contingent character of beauty. Beauty is not sought for its adaptive, utilitarian value, but as a value in and of itself.
Many popular ideas are contested in this book. Despite widespread opinion to the contrary, females seem to not be attracted to extremely masculine traits. Instead, it is hypothesized that such hyper-masculine features arose due to male-to-male competition. Through female mate choice, men have actually evolved to social cooperation and reduced aggressiveness.
Finally, the last chapter makes an intriguing connection between eugenics and the obsession with adaptive improvement, since eugenic social programs were explicitly anti-aesthetic.
Aesthetic choice and adaptive mate choice are often opposed. Sexual autonomy drives the production of the beautiful, motivating aesthetic evolution via sexual selection.
July 26, 2019
The book's main thesis is interesting and well-supported by the author - that aesthetic mate choice is an evolutionary force which forms the features of many animals. Thus, a male pheasant's tail feathers coevolve with the female pheasant's aesthetic preference for these feathers. This is a very interesting idea which is not well popularized and the author does it justice.
The book, however, veers off point in the discussions. The author is an active birdwatcher and fills the pages with minute descriptions of birds which he finds fascinating. Now, I like to think of myself as interested in biology and in general curious of descriptions of animal behaviours, however, when I am exposed to multiple consecutive chapters on how exactly birds wiggle their tails or gather their sticks to make their nests, unfortunately I end up tuning out. It's just really boring to read, though it does support the author's hypothesis.
What bugs me the most about the book, however, is that the author's overall life perspective and moral philosophies constantly leak into his scientific discussions. The author seems to unselfconsciously believe that the entire natural universe conforms to his inherent social convictions. Thus, he sees feminism in birds, feels that human sexual evolution is largely a story of female sexual autonomy, and bends over backwards to ensure that homosexuals are "completely equal" in personality even when his own theory predicts that they have been selected for the specific nonviolent (and again, feminist) trait of decreased male-on-female sexual violence. It is hard to imagine a more politically correct treatise at all - when describing the various complexities of nature he nearly never counters any prevalent liberal social ideas. No wonder this book nearly won the Pulitzer Prize - when it confirms nearly every belief of the generic modern reader, of course the readership will love it.
At some points, however, and especially in the culminating chapters describing human evolution, his desire to fit reality to his own views gets downright ridiculous. Very often he contradicts himself, if not on consecutive paragraphs, then on consecutive pages. For example, on one page he describes how homosexuality is strongly hereditary, on another he can't resist, out of the blue and off-topic, spending multiple paragraphs arguing that there is no such thing as a gay gene.
When describing female orgasm, he again works himself into exclusively politically correct straits. He had spent most of the book describing how one sex can select for complex traits to emerge in another purely through aesthetic choice, yet when it comes to describing the origin of the mysterious female orgasm he cannot bring himself to suggest that female orgasm might exist because males enjoy it. He also cannot bring himself to believe that it can be a vestigial artifact of the male orgasm, though he had described at least two examples of similarly vestigial gendered artifacts in birds elsewhere in the book - a thickened wing bone and feather-free head patch. But no, instead of considering the possibility that the female orgasm can be at all beholden to the male's, he bends over backwards to describe an entirely new "Pleasure Happens" hypothesis (capitalized for effect!), specially crafted for the occasion, whereby females have independently evolved the orgasm for themselves purely for self enjoyment. Checkmate! Female autonomy wins again. However, I wish I could ask him directly - if there exists such a convenient mechanism for animals to evolve their own happiness, then why haven't humans, and animals in general, evolved a way to just stimulate our own bliss across the board?
Now, I don't claim to know the answer to either the origins of the female orgasm, or of homosexuality. However, when en masse we see that his body of argumentation consistently and emotionally guides itself into politically correct, socially appropriate, entirely wonderful and feminist conclusions, it just leads one to very strongly believe that the author is consistently misleading himself and his readers via his own personal biases and preferences.
Unfortunately, however, nature is not subject to Prim's well-intentioned feelings, and therefore I can't recommend this book.
The book, however, veers off point in the discussions. The author is an active birdwatcher and fills the pages with minute descriptions of birds which he finds fascinating. Now, I like to think of myself as interested in biology and in general curious of descriptions of animal behaviours, however, when I am exposed to multiple consecutive chapters on how exactly birds wiggle their tails or gather their sticks to make their nests, unfortunately I end up tuning out. It's just really boring to read, though it does support the author's hypothesis.
What bugs me the most about the book, however, is that the author's overall life perspective and moral philosophies constantly leak into his scientific discussions. The author seems to unselfconsciously believe that the entire natural universe conforms to his inherent social convictions. Thus, he sees feminism in birds, feels that human sexual evolution is largely a story of female sexual autonomy, and bends over backwards to ensure that homosexuals are "completely equal" in personality even when his own theory predicts that they have been selected for the specific nonviolent (and again, feminist) trait of decreased male-on-female sexual violence. It is hard to imagine a more politically correct treatise at all - when describing the various complexities of nature he nearly never counters any prevalent liberal social ideas. No wonder this book nearly won the Pulitzer Prize - when it confirms nearly every belief of the generic modern reader, of course the readership will love it.
At some points, however, and especially in the culminating chapters describing human evolution, his desire to fit reality to his own views gets downright ridiculous. Very often he contradicts himself, if not on consecutive paragraphs, then on consecutive pages. For example, on one page he describes how homosexuality is strongly hereditary, on another he can't resist, out of the blue and off-topic, spending multiple paragraphs arguing that there is no such thing as a gay gene.
When describing female orgasm, he again works himself into exclusively politically correct straits. He had spent most of the book describing how one sex can select for complex traits to emerge in another purely through aesthetic choice, yet when it comes to describing the origin of the mysterious female orgasm he cannot bring himself to suggest that female orgasm might exist because males enjoy it. He also cannot bring himself to believe that it can be a vestigial artifact of the male orgasm, though he had described at least two examples of similarly vestigial gendered artifacts in birds elsewhere in the book - a thickened wing bone and feather-free head patch. But no, instead of considering the possibility that the female orgasm can be at all beholden to the male's, he bends over backwards to describe an entirely new "Pleasure Happens" hypothesis (capitalized for effect!), specially crafted for the occasion, whereby females have independently evolved the orgasm for themselves purely for self enjoyment. Checkmate! Female autonomy wins again. However, I wish I could ask him directly - if there exists such a convenient mechanism for animals to evolve their own happiness, then why haven't humans, and animals in general, evolved a way to just stimulate our own bliss across the board?
Now, I don't claim to know the answer to either the origins of the female orgasm, or of homosexuality. However, when en masse we see that his body of argumentation consistently and emotionally guides itself into politically correct, socially appropriate, entirely wonderful and feminist conclusions, it just leads one to very strongly believe that the author is consistently misleading himself and his readers via his own personal biases and preferences.
Unfortunately, however, nature is not subject to Prim's well-intentioned feelings, and therefore I can't recommend this book.
March 14, 2018
It's often forgotten that Darwin was not, strictly speaking, the bloke who discovered evolution. What he did discover was arguably far more important: the mechanism through which evolution takes place - natural selection. It's natural selection which answers the 'how' of evolution, the means by which life 'descends with modification'. Or at least, that's the standard story generally told about Darwin's place in the evolutionary pantheon. What's even further forgotten in this already simplified tale is that Darwin didn't postulate just one, but in fact two mechanisms of evolution, the second being the selective pressure of mate choice, or rather, sexual selection. Not just survival, but the distinct ability to find and impress a mate stand guard at the doorway of evolutionary success. Natural selection and sexual selection, the twin pillars of evolutionary biology, the dual principles underlying the evolution of all life on Earth.
Right? Well, depends on who you ask. Even from the get-go, the independent footing of sexual selection was never easily admitted, with Darwin's famous contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, dismissing sexual selection as a mere offshoot of the more primary mechanism of natural selection. Not only was the idea of animals making aesthetic choices - choices on the basis of beauty alone - deemed absurd, but granting that such choices had the power of shaping the biosphere was simply beyond the pale (especially given that, for the most part, these choices were made by - shock horror - females!). Such was the ferocity of these critiques that ever since, sexual selection has long lived in the half-light of natural selection, with mate choice largely understood to be, at best, a matter of selecting for the 'fittest' partner (with beauty being nothing other than a cipher or sign-post for fitness).
Against such widely held 'sign-post' theories of sexual selection however, stands Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty, which aims to do nothing less than reinstate the rank of sexual selection to its original place as a fully-fledged mechanism of evolution in its own right. More than just an academic reminder to 'get Darwin right' though, Prum, a Yale ornithologist, marshals evidence from all across the avian world - from the nests of Bowerbirds to the sexual anatomy of Ducks, the tail feathers of the Great Argus to the 'dances' of Manakin birds - to establish once and for all the irreducible role of beauty as a driver of evolution. So much so in fact, that, contrary to 'adaptationist' approaches in which evolution can only ever be steered by increasing chances of survival, sexual selection can and in fact has, worked against natural selection, making animals less fit, or rather less-than-optimal when it comes to survival.
Such are the stakes involved here, which, more than just being another pleasing tale of the evolution of 'this' or 'that', aim to rebound upon our very understanding of what evolution really is, and how, exactly, it really works. While I've skipped over a great deal of the book's nitty gritty, trust me when I say that Prum is a storyteller of almost magical ability, weaving personal anecdote with the scientific cutting-edge, a love of birds with a love of science, all of which make for a read as gorgeously written as it is intellectually mind-opening. While some have quibbled with Prum's disciplinary polemics and (liberal) politics, both pinned fairly prominently throughout the book, in truth, I have nothing but admiration for Prum's resolute affirmation of - wait for it - the feminist implications of his research (in nuce: sexual selection means that female choice matters: female autonomy literally shapes life), along with the 'post-human aesthetic philosophy' upon which he calls to be incipit in its wake. A marvellous, paradigm altering book.
Right? Well, depends on who you ask. Even from the get-go, the independent footing of sexual selection was never easily admitted, with Darwin's famous contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, dismissing sexual selection as a mere offshoot of the more primary mechanism of natural selection. Not only was the idea of animals making aesthetic choices - choices on the basis of beauty alone - deemed absurd, but granting that such choices had the power of shaping the biosphere was simply beyond the pale (especially given that, for the most part, these choices were made by - shock horror - females!). Such was the ferocity of these critiques that ever since, sexual selection has long lived in the half-light of natural selection, with mate choice largely understood to be, at best, a matter of selecting for the 'fittest' partner (with beauty being nothing other than a cipher or sign-post for fitness).
Against such widely held 'sign-post' theories of sexual selection however, stands Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty, which aims to do nothing less than reinstate the rank of sexual selection to its original place as a fully-fledged mechanism of evolution in its own right. More than just an academic reminder to 'get Darwin right' though, Prum, a Yale ornithologist, marshals evidence from all across the avian world - from the nests of Bowerbirds to the sexual anatomy of Ducks, the tail feathers of the Great Argus to the 'dances' of Manakin birds - to establish once and for all the irreducible role of beauty as a driver of evolution. So much so in fact, that, contrary to 'adaptationist' approaches in which evolution can only ever be steered by increasing chances of survival, sexual selection can and in fact has, worked against natural selection, making animals less fit, or rather less-than-optimal when it comes to survival.
Such are the stakes involved here, which, more than just being another pleasing tale of the evolution of 'this' or 'that', aim to rebound upon our very understanding of what evolution really is, and how, exactly, it really works. While I've skipped over a great deal of the book's nitty gritty, trust me when I say that Prum is a storyteller of almost magical ability, weaving personal anecdote with the scientific cutting-edge, a love of birds with a love of science, all of which make for a read as gorgeously written as it is intellectually mind-opening. While some have quibbled with Prum's disciplinary polemics and (liberal) politics, both pinned fairly prominently throughout the book, in truth, I have nothing but admiration for Prum's resolute affirmation of - wait for it - the feminist implications of his research (in nuce: sexual selection means that female choice matters: female autonomy literally shapes life), along with the 'post-human aesthetic philosophy' upon which he calls to be incipit in its wake. A marvellous, paradigm altering book.
April 3, 2019
The topic is fascinating and Prum's argument is intriguing (challenging the mainstream evolutionary dogma that has existed since Darwin), but it gradually grew repetitive as he goes down each successive rabbit-hole example. After 100 pages, his argument was made, but it just kept going over additional territory to demonstrate the same point. It became a chore to finish the second half.
April 29, 2021
Potrei definire questo libro per la prima metà un mix tra "L'origine delle specie" e "Viaggio di un naturalista intorno al mondo", in cui l'autore cerca di esplicare la sua ipotesi in relazione alle sue esperienze di ricerca, per poi passare, nella seconda parte del libro, a come il frutto delle sue ipotesi si possano applicare i vari casi di studio evoluzionistico.
Il libro non è dei più scorrevoli, ma è davvero interessante e fa riflettere il lettore sulla veridicità della sua ipotesi.
Gli ultimi capitoli sono stati i miei preferiti, non solo per i temi trattati e su come lo fa, ma soprattutto perché le sue riflessioni sono degne di nota.
Il libro non è dei più scorrevoli, ma è davvero interessante e fa riflettere il lettore sulla veridicità della sua ipotesi.
Gli ultimi capitoli sono stati i miei preferiti, non solo per i temi trattati e su come lo fa, ma soprattutto perché le sue riflessioni sono degne di nota.
January 22, 2018
This book's title *and* subtitle are not enticing enough. It should simply be called "Sextastic Sexiness Sexplains Everything (Not Just Sex)." Not only would it sum up the main point of the book, but it also explains why it's as much a page-turner as it is a head-scratcher, and not (just) a confounding recap of whenever you first learned about evolution by natural selection.
Speaking of recap, a quick recap: most of the features we see in living things today we try to explain via natural selection, e.g. if a bunch of animals have big noses, it's probably because big noses allowed the ancestors of that bunch of animals to have more kids than their peers who had smaller noses. Maybe big noses let them find food more efficiently, and the small noses starved to death before they could have many kids. This was the key insight of a dude named Charles Darwin. It revolutionized all of biology, and today we generally call this kind of thinking Darwinism.
BUT, Darwin had another great idea to explain why organisms change over the generations and why we see so much diversity today. If animals have sex, and can choose who they have sex with, their own preferences could drive change. Maybe big noses don't help with finding food at all, but ladies love them, so guys with big noses have more sex with more partners and have more kids, while the poor small noses get bred out of existence.
It sounds kind of simple, but one of Prum's main arguments in this book is that it is anything but simple, and anything but accepted in evolutionary biology, and he goes so far as to suggest that it has affected everything from feminism to human penis size to art. I'm guessing at least one of those things is of interest to almost every human, and thus I suggest that you will probably find this book as interesting as I did.
I, of course, had some problems, because problems are just the kinds of things I have.
1) Way too obsessed with Darwin. Chuck was a great guy, don't get me wrong, but Prum's repeated insistence that we be "authentically Darwinian" began to sound like idolization after a while. Just because Darwin thought something was true doesn't prove it true. Experimentation proves things are true. Usually. I understand the desire to reclaim the meaning of the word "Darwinian," but I think it was a bit overplayed
2) Not everyone has sex. This book convinced me of the importance of mate choice... in organisms that mate and can perceive and choose mates, which kind of ignores all plants, fungi, bacteria, asexual animals, etc., so is mate choice really that fundamental a part of evolution? Adaptation doesn't explain everything, as Prum argues again and again here, and I was actually on board with that before even starting (since reading Gould and Lewontin's Spandrels of San Marco in college), but I also agree with Daniel Dennett that adaption is probably the strongest and most common evolutionary force, and it's hard to overlook the fact that mate choice doesn't seem possible for the vast majority of the Tree of Life. That said, plants and fungi *do* mate, and even some bacteria and archaea engage in lateral gene transfer. If Prum could have shown that some of these organisms have preferences and that those preferences seem arbitrary that would have been amazing.
3) Why is mate choice a better null model than adaptation? Totally agree that a null model should be falsifiable, but wouldn't the best null model always be that nothing special is happening and a trait arose by chance, e.g. there used to be folks with small noses but it just so happened almost all of them got killed in an avalanche?
4) Human stuff: this is where Prum gets super speculative. It's fascinating and a great call to action for future research, but I feel like evolutionary theories about anything human are always hampered by the fact that we only have one species of human to look at and the fossil record can only tell us so much. It's not like manakins and bowerbirds where we have dozens to compare and make trees with. Even if you expand your thinking to the great apes as Prum does, you only get four more data points. This kind of makes arguments like the one about testicle size decreasing in the human lineage because of decreased need for sperm competition ring a bit hollow. I mean, maybe? Comparing testicle size and mating behavior among the other great apes is interesting but... there are so few of them. If there were 50 great apes, it would be a stronger argument.
5) Liberal bias. I suspect I'm about as politically liberal as Prum is, but a lot of the stuff about feminism, art, and homosexuality had my too-good-to-be-true alarms going off. The chapter about duck sex was dark, super dark, like rape as a species-defining act dark, and I feel like Prum eschewed some of the maladaptive potential of toxic masculinity in humans in an effort to look on the bright side in the absence of the kind of great data he and his colleagues collected about ducks. But who knows, maybe future research will support him. I hope it does.
P.S. Did I mention there are a lot of awesome facts about birds in here? I didn't? There are. If you like facts and you like birds, you will like this book. If you like ducks and want to continue liking ducks, though, maybe give it a pass.
Speaking of recap, a quick recap: most of the features we see in living things today we try to explain via natural selection, e.g. if a bunch of animals have big noses, it's probably because big noses allowed the ancestors of that bunch of animals to have more kids than their peers who had smaller noses. Maybe big noses let them find food more efficiently, and the small noses starved to death before they could have many kids. This was the key insight of a dude named Charles Darwin. It revolutionized all of biology, and today we generally call this kind of thinking Darwinism.
BUT, Darwin had another great idea to explain why organisms change over the generations and why we see so much diversity today. If animals have sex, and can choose who they have sex with, their own preferences could drive change. Maybe big noses don't help with finding food at all, but ladies love them, so guys with big noses have more sex with more partners and have more kids, while the poor small noses get bred out of existence.
It sounds kind of simple, but one of Prum's main arguments in this book is that it is anything but simple, and anything but accepted in evolutionary biology, and he goes so far as to suggest that it has affected everything from feminism to human penis size to art. I'm guessing at least one of those things is of interest to almost every human, and thus I suggest that you will probably find this book as interesting as I did.
I, of course, had some problems, because problems are just the kinds of things I have.
1) Way too obsessed with Darwin. Chuck was a great guy, don't get me wrong, but Prum's repeated insistence that we be "authentically Darwinian" began to sound like idolization after a while. Just because Darwin thought something was true doesn't prove it true. Experimentation proves things are true. Usually. I understand the desire to reclaim the meaning of the word "Darwinian," but I think it was a bit overplayed
2) Not everyone has sex. This book convinced me of the importance of mate choice... in organisms that mate and can perceive and choose mates, which kind of ignores all plants, fungi, bacteria, asexual animals, etc., so is mate choice really that fundamental a part of evolution? Adaptation doesn't explain everything, as Prum argues again and again here, and I was actually on board with that before even starting (since reading Gould and Lewontin's Spandrels of San Marco in college), but I also agree with Daniel Dennett that adaption is probably the strongest and most common evolutionary force, and it's hard to overlook the fact that mate choice doesn't seem possible for the vast majority of the Tree of Life. That said, plants and fungi *do* mate, and even some bacteria and archaea engage in lateral gene transfer. If Prum could have shown that some of these organisms have preferences and that those preferences seem arbitrary that would have been amazing.
3) Why is mate choice a better null model than adaptation? Totally agree that a null model should be falsifiable, but wouldn't the best null model always be that nothing special is happening and a trait arose by chance, e.g. there used to be folks with small noses but it just so happened almost all of them got killed in an avalanche?
4) Human stuff: this is where Prum gets super speculative. It's fascinating and a great call to action for future research, but I feel like evolutionary theories about anything human are always hampered by the fact that we only have one species of human to look at and the fossil record can only tell us so much. It's not like manakins and bowerbirds where we have dozens to compare and make trees with. Even if you expand your thinking to the great apes as Prum does, you only get four more data points. This kind of makes arguments like the one about testicle size decreasing in the human lineage because of decreased need for sperm competition ring a bit hollow. I mean, maybe? Comparing testicle size and mating behavior among the other great apes is interesting but... there are so few of them. If there were 50 great apes, it would be a stronger argument.
5) Liberal bias. I suspect I'm about as politically liberal as Prum is, but a lot of the stuff about feminism, art, and homosexuality had my too-good-to-be-true alarms going off. The chapter about duck sex was dark, super dark, like rape as a species-defining act dark, and I feel like Prum eschewed some of the maladaptive potential of toxic masculinity in humans in an effort to look on the bright side in the absence of the kind of great data he and his colleagues collected about ducks. But who knows, maybe future research will support him. I hope it does.
P.S. Did I mention there are a lot of awesome facts about birds in here? I didn't? There are. If you like facts and you like birds, you will like this book. If you like ducks and want to continue liking ducks, though, maybe give it a pass.
October 17, 2018
Interesting. Very clinical. If you're a fan of Darwinian theory this is for you. If you're not you'll hate it.
September 8, 2017
My takeaway from this book - if you believe what most evolutionary biologists believe rather than Prum's flavor of mate selection you are a sexist eugenicist (basically a nazi) forcing a square peg into a round hole and, worst of all, an apostate opposed to Darwin himself! I often find this sort of "everyone's out to get me" narrative, and it just comes off as desperate and defensive - all it serves to do is put my on notice that I should be deeply skeptical of what this person is about to say, because evidently their arguments don't stand on their own.
I don't know this field well enough to know if Prum is also constructing a straw-man of his intellectual opponents (though I wouldn't be surprised), but if it's true that evolutionary biologists believe there's nothing arbitrary co-evolved features, then I'm at least on his side about that. I can even imagine there are a lot of non-equilibrium or partial-equilibrium dynamics (metastable evolutionary states, for example) at play that could give rise to inherited aesthetic preferences in direct contradiction to the fitness function, but Prum does not explore this at all, he just mentions a Fisher model of aesthetic preferences and asserts without real proof that this is the "null hypothesis" for some reason, then carps on about that for the rest of the book. I'd very much like to read a version of this book that is not quite so adversarial and reconciles the obvious problems with an "arbitrary aesthetic preferences" model for highly conserved features that are also greatly deliterious to organism survival that the costly signal mechanism is intended to explain.
Regarding Prum's idea that the "beauty happens" model is the null hypothesis (or, as he calls it, the "beauty happens null model", as if repeating it over and over again will somehow make it true), I think he's somewhat hijacking this idea (in the same way that he accuses his opponents of hijacking it for their own purposes) to try and get his idea set as the "default" so that it can be asserted without proof. But in fact, the "default" model is we don't know why. There's evidence (as I alluded to above) that costly signals exist in other evolutionary and strategic systems, there's also obviously evidence that aesthetic preferences exist (and there's also reason to believe that they must at least occasionally be arbitrary in at least some non-equilibrium situations). If there's nothing to differentiate between them, you don't just say "Well, this one is the default", you say, "It could be either of these things, if we want to know which one, we'll need to propose some mechanism to distinguish between them."
The reason this is a 2-star review instead of a 1-star review is because there actually does seem to be a good amount of likely factual information in the book in between Prum's bouts of sophistry. Some of the mate selection stuff he provides seems reasonably plausible (particularly when it seems closer to mainstream opinions about things like sexual dynamics), but I'd actually need a well-reasoned and neutral perspective on the topic just because I feel I can't trust most of what Prum says.
I don't know this field well enough to know if Prum is also constructing a straw-man of his intellectual opponents (though I wouldn't be surprised), but if it's true that evolutionary biologists believe there's nothing arbitrary co-evolved features, then I'm at least on his side about that. I can even imagine there are a lot of non-equilibrium or partial-equilibrium dynamics (metastable evolutionary states, for example) at play that could give rise to inherited aesthetic preferences in direct contradiction to the fitness function, but Prum does not explore this at all, he just mentions a Fisher model of aesthetic preferences and asserts without real proof that this is the "null hypothesis" for some reason, then carps on about that for the rest of the book. I'd very much like to read a version of this book that is not quite so adversarial and reconciles the obvious problems with an "arbitrary aesthetic preferences" model for highly conserved features that are also greatly deliterious to organism survival that the costly signal mechanism is intended to explain.
Regarding Prum's idea that the "beauty happens" model is the null hypothesis (or, as he calls it, the "beauty happens null model", as if repeating it over and over again will somehow make it true), I think he's somewhat hijacking this idea (in the same way that he accuses his opponents of hijacking it for their own purposes) to try and get his idea set as the "default" so that it can be asserted without proof. But in fact, the "default" model is we don't know why. There's evidence (as I alluded to above) that costly signals exist in other evolutionary and strategic systems, there's also obviously evidence that aesthetic preferences exist (and there's also reason to believe that they must at least occasionally be arbitrary in at least some non-equilibrium situations). If there's nothing to differentiate between them, you don't just say "Well, this one is the default", you say, "It could be either of these things, if we want to know which one, we'll need to propose some mechanism to distinguish between them."
The reason this is a 2-star review instead of a 1-star review is because there actually does seem to be a good amount of likely factual information in the book in between Prum's bouts of sophistry. Some of the mate selection stuff he provides seems reasonably plausible (particularly when it seems closer to mainstream opinions about things like sexual dynamics), but I'd actually need a well-reasoned and neutral perspective on the topic just because I feel I can't trust most of what Prum says.
September 1, 2019
There is good reason to believe that many physical forms and behaviors relating to mating are not adaptive in the sense of promoting the survival and proliferation of a species. And the Zahavi theory that obviously non-adaptive features, like the peacock's tail, are developed as handicaps to adverstise that potential mates are so strong that they can fight with a hand tied behind their backs, always struck me as just plain dumb. This is the first book that I have read that proposes aesthetic mate choice as the driving force behind these seemingly non-adaptive forms, and I think that it makes a lot of sense. Prum says that Darwin advanced this theory of sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and maybe he did, but I have not read The Descent of Man, so I can't say whether this was really Darwin's theory or if Prum just wants to cloak himself with authority by appealing to the master. In any case, the idea is an interesting one, and it becomes particularly interesting in some of Prum's suggestions that sexual selection driven by aesthetic mate choice could work synchronously with natural selection in the development of things as important as feathers that could be used for flight (and not just thermal regulation) and in the development of less aggressive behavior in human males that may have facilitated the rise of human civilization. He offers no compelling evidence to back up these speculations but they certainly suggest interesting and possibly productive paths for future research.
I enjoyed Prum's pokes at evolutionary psychology where he says that many of the practitioners seem to have a need to tell evolutionary "Just So" stories to justify every aspect of human sexuality as being explainable as adaptations driven by natural selection, even when the fit seems weak. This was exactly my reaction to my first exposure to evolutionary psychology in the book "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters," which caused me to see evolutionary psychology as a good idea that is being pushed too far.
The place were I parted ways with Prum was at the very end of the book where he suggests that his theories of sexual selection are consistent with queer theory and modern ideas of gender fluidity. I have a lot of sympathy with his political leanings, but I think that in the end it is dangerous to try to use evolutionary science to support social and political ideas, even ones that I support. It is just the flip side of the fortunately discredited ideas of eugenics and Social Darwinism, no better when we do it than when they do it. I don't think that we can or should stick our heads in the sand and try to build an unbreachable Chinese Wall between evolutionary science and social movements, but we need to be super careful about this because it is area that is ripe for abuse whether it is being used by the left or the right.
I enjoyed Prum's pokes at evolutionary psychology where he says that many of the practitioners seem to have a need to tell evolutionary "Just So" stories to justify every aspect of human sexuality as being explainable as adaptations driven by natural selection, even when the fit seems weak. This was exactly my reaction to my first exposure to evolutionary psychology in the book "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters," which caused me to see evolutionary psychology as a good idea that is being pushed too far.
The place were I parted ways with Prum was at the very end of the book where he suggests that his theories of sexual selection are consistent with queer theory and modern ideas of gender fluidity. I have a lot of sympathy with his political leanings, but I think that in the end it is dangerous to try to use evolutionary science to support social and political ideas, even ones that I support. It is just the flip side of the fortunately discredited ideas of eugenics and Social Darwinism, no better when we do it than when they do it. I don't think that we can or should stick our heads in the sand and try to build an unbreachable Chinese Wall between evolutionary science and social movements, but we need to be super careful about this because it is area that is ripe for abuse whether it is being used by the left or the right.
November 28, 2021
Note: This is not a book review but instead an exploration of my current stance on a central debate in the field of evolutionary biology. I have used the popular example of a peacock's tail but it can be replaced with any male aesthetic trait in a species with significant sexual dimorphism. As for the book - Prum is sufficiently nuanced with his treatment of sexual selection theory, viewing it in a primarily ornithological context and then carefully extending it to other phylogenies, including humans. Recommended.
Why is the peacock's tail so beautiful?
Darwin had originally proposed two fundamental forces behind evolution - natural selection and sexual selection. He used sexual selection and aesthetic mate choice by females to explain the peacock's tail and other aesthetic traits found across the natural world. Aesthetic traits in males coevolve with female preferences for those traits in a runaway process to create something like a peacock's tail. Over several iterations (as R.A. Fisher would mathematically prove about a century later), female aesthetic taste leads to careful fine-tuning of male aesthetic traits and...beauty happens. Similar to how the price of a tulip kept increasing due to market preferences during the Tulip Bubble of the 1600s, the peacock's tail, lion's mane, and elk's antlers have become what they have due to generations of females acting on their arbitrary aesthetic preferences. Fisherian aesthetic selection is the genetic equivalent of a market bubble driven by irrational exuberance. The irrationality of the aesthetic selection process is evident in how it is often at odds with natural selection. Beauty competes with survival (survival in the face of both environmental threats and male-male competition). The natural world of birds and animals we ultimately observe is the game-theoretically stable state of beauty vs. survival, both constantly interacting with and influencing each other.
So according to Darwin, the peacock's tail has been shaped by generations of peahens and their subjective tastes (I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist as I write this). Unfortunately, a theory with subjectivity, animal agency, and more importantly female agency at its center had no place in 19th century Britain.
The lesser-known co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, Alfred Wallace, was a staunch utilitarian and believed that to invoke 'female choice' was bordering on mysticism. He believed instead that beauty has to have a function. Wallace proposed that male beauty serves as an indicator of good health and fitness. The peacock with its iridescent blue plumage and gorgeous tail is signaling its fitness and the absence of disease to females. Due to Wallace's fierce efforts to proselytize the idea, beauty-as-utility became the standard explanation. Sexual selection now only existed as a sub-set of natural selection, both ultimately maximizing purely adaptive functions.
Amotz Zahavi later introduced the handicap principle or the idea that that the peacock tail (to continue using the example) is an honest signal of fitness because it inflicts an undeniable cost on the male who possesses it. The fact that I have survived for so long despite my extremely conspicuous and heavy tail is a testament to my fitness and good genes. If a signal is costly, it must be honest. Zahavian signaling lent credence to Wallace's beauty-as-utility idea and this neo-Wallacean adaptionism has since taken over the field of evolutionary biology.
To me, the neo-Wallacean view was very enticing when I first encountered it. On the surface, it paints a very rationalist picture of evolution through natural selection. In this view, sexual selection falls under natural selection as just another process through which organisms are selected for fitness. Everything must serve an objective, adaptive function. Indeed, I found immense comfort in this idea for over three years during which I was surprisingly only exposed to the adaptionist view of Darwinism. Darwin's core idea of sexual selection (which he describes in The Descent of Man) is conspicuous by its absence from today's Darwinism. It speaks to how dogmas can completely take over a science. It is particularly concerning given that empirical evidence in support of the beauty-as-utility theory seems to be virtually non-existent.
Perhaps one of the reasons why I found comfort in the beauty-as-utility explanation is because of its simplicity. It flattens the intellectual complexity of the world around us into a singular, definitive explanation. While the explanation might be easy to intuit, I have now come to believe that it is likely a parochial and incomplete view of life. It overfits reality into a rationalist framework that is unsupported by real-world evidence. The dogmatic persistence and the quasi-religious fervor around the neo-Wallacean theory in fact reminds me of the field of economics prior to the behavioral revolution of the early 2000s.
At the heart of economics and finance was the assumption that all humans were rational agents making rational decisions that would maximize their utility. Humans are objective, decisions are rational, and markets are efficient. It took Kahneman, Tversky, Shiller, et al. and about two decades of work for that core assumption to be put to bed. Eric Weinstein talks about economics as an 'as-if physics' of natural and sexual selection. I have spoken to economists who shy away from this explanation (the idealist in me says it's due to humility and not willful ignorance) but I find it to be an extremely useful framing. It is no surprise to me then that economics, the physics of natural and sexual selection, was made richer by the introduction of irrationality, subjectivity, and randomness, which seem to be an inherent part of the natural world. Evolutionary science, which is essentially the philosophy of natural and sexual selection, needs to catch up.
Here's a small example of a logical problem with the neo-Wallacean beauty-as-utility theory. The peacock's tail is obviously costly to the peacock who possess it, at least marginally reducing the probability of his survival. But that is only half the story. Peahens suffer an indirect cost through their male offspring who will carry the burden of a tail. This implies that the adaptive benefit that peahens receive from picking males with the most beautiful tail must outweigh the cost inflicted on their male offspring. If that is the case, then over time in a population, one should expect to see diminishing returns from female vigilance as harmful genes will eventually be selected out of the population. One should subsequently expect to see female vigilance go down over time to compensate for the indirect cost that comes with picking males with the best tails. This would create an oscillating pattern in the population with female vigilance increasing while the benefit outweighs indirect costs and then once an equilibrium is attained, female vigilance should drop. We do not observe this pattern in nature. Moreover, several studies conducted on peacock tails and fitness have failed to find any meaningful correlations. Perhaps peahens select peacocks with beautiful tails because they just really like beautiful tails.
The beauty happens hypothesis driven by female aesthetic mate choice is the most parsimonious explanation for the evidence we see in the world around us. The onus should be on the adaptionists to prove whether beauty has utility. Darwin ends the Origin of Species with the phrase - 'There is grandeur in this view of life...'. I believe that aesthetic selection with its focus on subjective preferences of discerning creatures across phylogenies is essential to maintaining the grandeur in Darwin's theory.
So aesthetic selection explains how female peahens have over generations shaped the male peacock's tail based on what they find beautiful. The question I'm left with now is...why do we find the peacock's tail beautiful?
--------------------------
Note: I consciously decided to not include any discussion on how aesthetic selection plays out in humans because it wasn't necessary for the purposes of this review. In general, one must proceed with extreme caution while applying tools of evolutionary logic to humans because it is quite easy to reach conclusions that do more harm than good. The inherent complexity of human evolution is in part due to the fact that it took place in four distinct phases (phases 3 and 4 of which are uniquely human) -
1. Evolution that occurred during or even before our history of shared ancestry with mammals, primates, and apes
2. Evolution that occurred in the human lineage since our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees
3. Evolution that occurred, and continues to occur, among living humans today
4. Cultural evolution that began in the last 75,000 years
The fundamental evolutionary forces remain the same but they influence human male and female phenotypes in unexpected ways. Prum has some interesting speculative hypotheses in the second half of the book. Recommended.
Why is the peacock's tail so beautiful?
Darwin had originally proposed two fundamental forces behind evolution - natural selection and sexual selection. He used sexual selection and aesthetic mate choice by females to explain the peacock's tail and other aesthetic traits found across the natural world. Aesthetic traits in males coevolve with female preferences for those traits in a runaway process to create something like a peacock's tail. Over several iterations (as R.A. Fisher would mathematically prove about a century later), female aesthetic taste leads to careful fine-tuning of male aesthetic traits and...beauty happens. Similar to how the price of a tulip kept increasing due to market preferences during the Tulip Bubble of the 1600s, the peacock's tail, lion's mane, and elk's antlers have become what they have due to generations of females acting on their arbitrary aesthetic preferences. Fisherian aesthetic selection is the genetic equivalent of a market bubble driven by irrational exuberance. The irrationality of the aesthetic selection process is evident in how it is often at odds with natural selection. Beauty competes with survival (survival in the face of both environmental threats and male-male competition). The natural world of birds and animals we ultimately observe is the game-theoretically stable state of beauty vs. survival, both constantly interacting with and influencing each other.
So according to Darwin, the peacock's tail has been shaped by generations of peahens and their subjective tastes (I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist as I write this). Unfortunately, a theory with subjectivity, animal agency, and more importantly female agency at its center had no place in 19th century Britain.
The lesser-known co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, Alfred Wallace, was a staunch utilitarian and believed that to invoke 'female choice' was bordering on mysticism. He believed instead that beauty has to have a function. Wallace proposed that male beauty serves as an indicator of good health and fitness. The peacock with its iridescent blue plumage and gorgeous tail is signaling its fitness and the absence of disease to females. Due to Wallace's fierce efforts to proselytize the idea, beauty-as-utility became the standard explanation. Sexual selection now only existed as a sub-set of natural selection, both ultimately maximizing purely adaptive functions.
Amotz Zahavi later introduced the handicap principle or the idea that that the peacock tail (to continue using the example) is an honest signal of fitness because it inflicts an undeniable cost on the male who possesses it. The fact that I have survived for so long despite my extremely conspicuous and heavy tail is a testament to my fitness and good genes. If a signal is costly, it must be honest. Zahavian signaling lent credence to Wallace's beauty-as-utility idea and this neo-Wallacean adaptionism has since taken over the field of evolutionary biology.
To me, the neo-Wallacean view was very enticing when I first encountered it. On the surface, it paints a very rationalist picture of evolution through natural selection. In this view, sexual selection falls under natural selection as just another process through which organisms are selected for fitness. Everything must serve an objective, adaptive function. Indeed, I found immense comfort in this idea for over three years during which I was surprisingly only exposed to the adaptionist view of Darwinism. Darwin's core idea of sexual selection (which he describes in The Descent of Man) is conspicuous by its absence from today's Darwinism. It speaks to how dogmas can completely take over a science. It is particularly concerning given that empirical evidence in support of the beauty-as-utility theory seems to be virtually non-existent.
Perhaps one of the reasons why I found comfort in the beauty-as-utility explanation is because of its simplicity. It flattens the intellectual complexity of the world around us into a singular, definitive explanation. While the explanation might be easy to intuit, I have now come to believe that it is likely a parochial and incomplete view of life. It overfits reality into a rationalist framework that is unsupported by real-world evidence. The dogmatic persistence and the quasi-religious fervor around the neo-Wallacean theory in fact reminds me of the field of economics prior to the behavioral revolution of the early 2000s.
At the heart of economics and finance was the assumption that all humans were rational agents making rational decisions that would maximize their utility. Humans are objective, decisions are rational, and markets are efficient. It took Kahneman, Tversky, Shiller, et al. and about two decades of work for that core assumption to be put to bed. Eric Weinstein talks about economics as an 'as-if physics' of natural and sexual selection. I have spoken to economists who shy away from this explanation (the idealist in me says it's due to humility and not willful ignorance) but I find it to be an extremely useful framing. It is no surprise to me then that economics, the physics of natural and sexual selection, was made richer by the introduction of irrationality, subjectivity, and randomness, which seem to be an inherent part of the natural world. Evolutionary science, which is essentially the philosophy of natural and sexual selection, needs to catch up.
Here's a small example of a logical problem with the neo-Wallacean beauty-as-utility theory. The peacock's tail is obviously costly to the peacock who possess it, at least marginally reducing the probability of his survival. But that is only half the story. Peahens suffer an indirect cost through their male offspring who will carry the burden of a tail. This implies that the adaptive benefit that peahens receive from picking males with the most beautiful tail must outweigh the cost inflicted on their male offspring. If that is the case, then over time in a population, one should expect to see diminishing returns from female vigilance as harmful genes will eventually be selected out of the population. One should subsequently expect to see female vigilance go down over time to compensate for the indirect cost that comes with picking males with the best tails. This would create an oscillating pattern in the population with female vigilance increasing while the benefit outweighs indirect costs and then once an equilibrium is attained, female vigilance should drop. We do not observe this pattern in nature. Moreover, several studies conducted on peacock tails and fitness have failed to find any meaningful correlations. Perhaps peahens select peacocks with beautiful tails because they just really like beautiful tails.
The beauty happens hypothesis driven by female aesthetic mate choice is the most parsimonious explanation for the evidence we see in the world around us. The onus should be on the adaptionists to prove whether beauty has utility. Darwin ends the Origin of Species with the phrase - 'There is grandeur in this view of life...'. I believe that aesthetic selection with its focus on subjective preferences of discerning creatures across phylogenies is essential to maintaining the grandeur in Darwin's theory.
So aesthetic selection explains how female peahens have over generations shaped the male peacock's tail based on what they find beautiful. The question I'm left with now is...why do we find the peacock's tail beautiful?
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Note: I consciously decided to not include any discussion on how aesthetic selection plays out in humans because it wasn't necessary for the purposes of this review. In general, one must proceed with extreme caution while applying tools of evolutionary logic to humans because it is quite easy to reach conclusions that do more harm than good. The inherent complexity of human evolution is in part due to the fact that it took place in four distinct phases (phases 3 and 4 of which are uniquely human) -
1. Evolution that occurred during or even before our history of shared ancestry with mammals, primates, and apes
2. Evolution that occurred in the human lineage since our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees
3. Evolution that occurred, and continues to occur, among living humans today
4. Cultural evolution that began in the last 75,000 years
The fundamental evolutionary forces remain the same but they influence human male and female phenotypes in unexpected ways. Prum has some interesting speculative hypotheses in the second half of the book. Recommended.
July 15, 2021
Amazing guy and captivating book. Discovered Richard Prum's work through his episode on Conversations w Tyler. The last 5 minutes of the episode -- where Prum describes the uniqueness of his vantage point by intensely focusing on topics _he_ finds appealing without being influenced by prevailing ideas of what the community believes is important -- was powerful. On a personal level for my work, should try and not be influenced too much by what others think is "important".
Some of the things I found striking:
- The idea that sexual/aesthetic selection is/was so controversial in evolutionary biology and how the community is grappling with competing hypotheses to explain the diversity of beauty. A variation of this tension keeps coming in other academic ideaspaces (e.g., the Zucman-Summers debates on income/wealth inequality) - it's interesting to see what needs to happen for the community to finally consider a fringe idea mainstream, it seems to be as much a process revolving around egos and packaging as it is about the ideas themselves
- I LOVE reading about people who are obsessed about specific ideas, and there's something about obsessing on something "narrow" in the natural world that's particularly attractive (similar reads recently: Owls of the Eastern Ice, Under Land, The OverStory). Wonder what it is about these stories that are appealing to me...
- Reading about what some of these birds do was fascinating also - duck sex (and the sexual arms race between males and females), Manakins' lek displays (and aesthetic radiation), Argus Pheasants and their plumage, the Bowerbirds' bowers etc. Should do a trip to see some of these species
- The idea that female mate choice might be a powerful evolutionary force and Prum's hypothesis that it isn't coincidental that this idea has become more in vogue at the same time the feminist movement became more mainstream
- The last part about taking the evolutionary view of beauty and applying it to the arts - who gets to define what art is? Is traditional human art also a coevolutionary process where display and desire co-evolve? Do artists shape aesthetic preferences or vice versa?
Cool book
Some of the things I found striking:
- The idea that sexual/aesthetic selection is/was so controversial in evolutionary biology and how the community is grappling with competing hypotheses to explain the diversity of beauty. A variation of this tension keeps coming in other academic ideaspaces (e.g., the Zucman-Summers debates on income/wealth inequality) - it's interesting to see what needs to happen for the community to finally consider a fringe idea mainstream, it seems to be as much a process revolving around egos and packaging as it is about the ideas themselves
- I LOVE reading about people who are obsessed about specific ideas, and there's something about obsessing on something "narrow" in the natural world that's particularly attractive (similar reads recently: Owls of the Eastern Ice, Under Land, The OverStory). Wonder what it is about these stories that are appealing to me...
- Reading about what some of these birds do was fascinating also - duck sex (and the sexual arms race between males and females), Manakins' lek displays (and aesthetic radiation), Argus Pheasants and their plumage, the Bowerbirds' bowers etc. Should do a trip to see some of these species
- The idea that female mate choice might be a powerful evolutionary force and Prum's hypothesis that it isn't coincidental that this idea has become more in vogue at the same time the feminist movement became more mainstream
- The last part about taking the evolutionary view of beauty and applying it to the arts - who gets to define what art is? Is traditional human art also a coevolutionary process where display and desire co-evolve? Do artists shape aesthetic preferences or vice versa?
Cool book
March 24, 2019
I had on odd experience with this book, because the author annoys me in a number of ways, but I think his core thesis is probably correct. The book changed my thinking on the major issue of aesthetic selection, yet I also felt large sections were much weaker.
One of my least favorite things is how the author seems to invest a large amount of moral weight to this issue - I think it's unhelpful and leads to strange double standards. For example, he repeatedly condemns the sexual arms race in ducks as wasteful, yet doesn't seem to consider beauty arms races in the same way. I can't help but note that bowerbirds only live on a few islands, while ducks are pretty much everywhere.
After puncturing evolutionary psychology with some strong evidence, the author then goes on to... pretty much do the same thing. Many of the final arguments struck me as nearly pure speculation, often even adaptionist in the way he criticizes others.
On a more minor note, there's a huge amount of bird stuff in this book: descriptions of birds, narrated bird behavior, asides about birding, etc. Someone who cares more about birds would probably get more out of it, but for me it felt entirely aside from the theory that interested me. The culmination was a section where the author breathlessly goes through an extended story about how his research took him to a shocking discovery: two closely-related birds were in fact slightly more closely related than previously believed.
All told, I think the book is on the correct side of the scientific argument, but it doesn't do the best job of supporting that argument.
One of my least favorite things is how the author seems to invest a large amount of moral weight to this issue - I think it's unhelpful and leads to strange double standards. For example, he repeatedly condemns the sexual arms race in ducks as wasteful, yet doesn't seem to consider beauty arms races in the same way. I can't help but note that bowerbirds only live on a few islands, while ducks are pretty much everywhere.
After puncturing evolutionary psychology with some strong evidence, the author then goes on to... pretty much do the same thing. Many of the final arguments struck me as nearly pure speculation, often even adaptionist in the way he criticizes others.
On a more minor note, there's a huge amount of bird stuff in this book: descriptions of birds, narrated bird behavior, asides about birding, etc. Someone who cares more about birds would probably get more out of it, but for me it felt entirely aside from the theory that interested me. The culmination was a section where the author breathlessly goes through an extended story about how his research took him to a shocking discovery: two closely-related birds were in fact slightly more closely related than previously believed.
All told, I think the book is on the correct side of the scientific argument, but it doesn't do the best job of supporting that argument.
May 30, 2018
I was given this as a gift and was excited to read it, but it definitely didn’t live up to what I was hoping for. At the end of the day, I think the author’s underlying theory is wrong. He’s obviously a smart guy who knows a lot about both evolution and birds, but it seems to me that he’s trying to paint a picture of this huge landmark theory that doesn’t really hold any water. He seems to answer most of his own questions without acknowledging that the “super deep insightful questions” he’s asking already have scientifically sound answers that he glosses over. I slogged through it because the writing was decent and there was some interesting stuff, but I’m just not buying his main point. And for the love of god please put in text footnotes or endnotes instead of just a page number referenced list at the end of the book!
April 25, 2019
Usually when a popular science book is hailed as “breakthrough” or “revolutionary” I find that either it’s only novel because it makes absolutely no sense (e.g Antonio Damasio’s latest, “The Strange Order of Things) or it’s an old concept that is just being expressed compellingly for the first time. This book was totally an exception. The central premise is novel (to my knowledge), has predictive power, is testable, and written compellingly. I took several classes on evolutionary theory in college, and in my personal experience, he’s right that the theory of sexual selection he’s talking about was not taught to me and was in fact, ignored in favor of adaptive theories of sexual selection (which never really seemed that parsimonious to me).
“In a curious anthropomorphic inversion of nature, animal passions are now seen as more rational than our own.”
The central idea of the book is that sexual selection based on arbitrary (non-adaptive) features is a driver of evolutionary change independent of adaptive natural selection. The proposed mechanism is that if an organism has a preference for an arbitrary trait, and mates selectively with an organism that has that trait, their offspring will have not only that trait, but also a preference for that trait. In that way, you get a “runaway co-evolution” of the trait and the preference for that trait. I think that’s super interesting. The book is structured in my favorite way for popular science books: a plethora of careful observations (data), a presentation of possible explanations, then the evidence that one particular model (his “beauty happens” hypothesis) fits the available data the best, followed by a plausible mechanism.
I had a few superficial problems with the book. For example, he’s really bent on what being a true “Darwinian” means. In my mind, who cares? Darwin had some good ideas, and some not so good ideas, like every scientist ever. I don’t need to be married to all his ideas because I like the idea of natural selection. Also, he spends a really long time on some topics and not so long on others, and it doesn’t seem to be based on where there is the most evidence or interesting information, but just what caught his fancy at the time. Whatever, that’s his prerogative as a writer. While some parts were less interesting to me than they were to him, overall the book was balanced, well written and super interesting and thought-provoking.
I was left thinking, why did preferences for arbitrary traits evolve in the first place? I thought perhaps as a selective attention mechanism. As in, it was adaptive to pay closer attention to only a subset of available mates instead of spreading attention too thinly across all potential mates. In that case, you would expect a preference for arbitrary traits to be more concentrated in species that have historically had a great surplus of available mates presented simultaneously over species that only run into a potential mate like once in a blue moon. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I think it’s an interesting question.
Bottom line, would recommend, good popular science book.
“In a curious anthropomorphic inversion of nature, animal passions are now seen as more rational than our own.”
The central idea of the book is that sexual selection based on arbitrary (non-adaptive) features is a driver of evolutionary change independent of adaptive natural selection. The proposed mechanism is that if an organism has a preference for an arbitrary trait, and mates selectively with an organism that has that trait, their offspring will have not only that trait, but also a preference for that trait. In that way, you get a “runaway co-evolution” of the trait and the preference for that trait. I think that’s super interesting. The book is structured in my favorite way for popular science books: a plethora of careful observations (data), a presentation of possible explanations, then the evidence that one particular model (his “beauty happens” hypothesis) fits the available data the best, followed by a plausible mechanism.
I had a few superficial problems with the book. For example, he’s really bent on what being a true “Darwinian” means. In my mind, who cares? Darwin had some good ideas, and some not so good ideas, like every scientist ever. I don’t need to be married to all his ideas because I like the idea of natural selection. Also, he spends a really long time on some topics and not so long on others, and it doesn’t seem to be based on where there is the most evidence or interesting information, but just what caught his fancy at the time. Whatever, that’s his prerogative as a writer. While some parts were less interesting to me than they were to him, overall the book was balanced, well written and super interesting and thought-provoking.
I was left thinking, why did preferences for arbitrary traits evolve in the first place? I thought perhaps as a selective attention mechanism. As in, it was adaptive to pay closer attention to only a subset of available mates instead of spreading attention too thinly across all potential mates. In that case, you would expect a preference for arbitrary traits to be more concentrated in species that have historically had a great surplus of available mates presented simultaneously over species that only run into a potential mate like once in a blue moon. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I think it’s an interesting question.
Bottom line, would recommend, good popular science book.
January 12, 2020
Really a 4.5
SO many interesting facts, thoughts, perspectives all wrapped up in very good and enjoyable writing - and it is about birding and sexual evolution! WHAT MORE COULD I ASK FOR?! This book sits so squarely in the center of some of my biggest interests, birds and birding, aesthetic evolution (which I only just learned the name of), Darwinian theory, female sexuality, same sex desire, and an understanding of patriarchy and male violence ( of which, by the way, the author concludes, "Despite the near ubiquity of male culture dominance, this view implies that patriarchy is not inevitable, and it does not constitute human biological "destiny" (whatever that is)."). YOU ALL. It's like this book was written to be read by me.
The author posits, "In many ways, Darwin's idea that the aesthetic evaluations involved in mate choice among animals constitute an independent evolutionary force in nature as radical today as it was when he proposed it nearly 150 years ago. Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers of nature are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the dawn bird song chorus, the cooperative group displays of the blue Chiroxiphia manakins, the spectacular plumage of the male Great Argus Pheasant, and many other wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves." Because, of course they are! How much more sense does this supposition make than the commonly accepted, but limiting concept of evolution only as a continual natural selection of the fittest. As soon as I started to understand this premise (the author does a great job of walking us through LOTS of bird information to help us get here), it just clicked for so much of what I understand and believe of the world that is far less about biological imperative and far more about 'beauty' of all sorts when it comes to sexuality and mate selection. This was such an amazing thing to add to my consideration of the overall natural world - for birds and for us humans!
As the author says at the conclusion, "I realized along the way that bird-watching and science are both ways of exploring yourself in the world - parallel paths to find self-expression and meaning through engagement with the diversity and complexity of the natural world around us." Yes, please to more of all of it and to Richard Prum for helping to introduce complex scientific theories in ways that FEEL like engagement with the diversity and complexity of the natural world. This book delighted me in so many ways - not the least of which is the ways that the world opens up to us humans through the careful contemplation of birds. #BirdNerd4Life
Book 9 of 2020
SO many interesting facts, thoughts, perspectives all wrapped up in very good and enjoyable writing - and it is about birding and sexual evolution! WHAT MORE COULD I ASK FOR?! This book sits so squarely in the center of some of my biggest interests, birds and birding, aesthetic evolution (which I only just learned the name of), Darwinian theory, female sexuality, same sex desire, and an understanding of patriarchy and male violence ( of which, by the way, the author concludes, "Despite the near ubiquity of male culture dominance, this view implies that patriarchy is not inevitable, and it does not constitute human biological "destiny" (whatever that is)."). YOU ALL. It's like this book was written to be read by me.
The author posits, "In many ways, Darwin's idea that the aesthetic evaluations involved in mate choice among animals constitute an independent evolutionary force in nature as radical today as it was when he proposed it nearly 150 years ago. Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers of nature are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the dawn bird song chorus, the cooperative group displays of the blue Chiroxiphia manakins, the spectacular plumage of the male Great Argus Pheasant, and many other wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves." Because, of course they are! How much more sense does this supposition make than the commonly accepted, but limiting concept of evolution only as a continual natural selection of the fittest. As soon as I started to understand this premise (the author does a great job of walking us through LOTS of bird information to help us get here), it just clicked for so much of what I understand and believe of the world that is far less about biological imperative and far more about 'beauty' of all sorts when it comes to sexuality and mate selection. This was such an amazing thing to add to my consideration of the overall natural world - for birds and for us humans!
As the author says at the conclusion, "I realized along the way that bird-watching and science are both ways of exploring yourself in the world - parallel paths to find self-expression and meaning through engagement with the diversity and complexity of the natural world around us." Yes, please to more of all of it and to Richard Prum for helping to introduce complex scientific theories in ways that FEEL like engagement with the diversity and complexity of the natural world. This book delighted me in so many ways - not the least of which is the ways that the world opens up to us humans through the careful contemplation of birds. #BirdNerd4Life
Book 9 of 2020
October 22, 2019
Rated one of the top 10 Best Books of 2017 by the NYT, this is truly a really good read. The author, Richard Prum has an infectious passion for ornithology and it's easy to get caught up in the magic. For example, are you aware that when a birder identifies a bird in the wild (ie. anywhere outdoors), she uses the same parts of the brain that other people use to recognize familiar faces such as Abraham Lincoln, Jennifer Anniston and/or your aunt?
And there are birds that look grey and black and brown until it's time to impress their ladybird friends----only then do the colors come out in magnificent plumage of a sophisticated pattern of a golden Persian carpet. Then there's duck rape and homosexual behavior in birds, and all kinds of things that can't be explained by our current understanding of evolution. This is a good place for a mind-opening experience.
And there are birds that look grey and black and brown until it's time to impress their ladybird friends----only then do the colors come out in magnificent plumage of a sophisticated pattern of a golden Persian carpet. Then there's duck rape and homosexual behavior in birds, and all kinds of things that can't be explained by our current understanding of evolution. This is a good place for a mind-opening experience.
December 2, 2021
Really interesting and informative, with a lot of insights from birds and primates about male-female human sexual relations. Hit hard when he talked about how homosexual-only sexual preferences in males may have developed through female mate choice as females selected for males with more prosocial behavior, since that decreases male-male competition and increases female sexual autonomy.... so you're saying it's my own fault that I always fell for gay guys when I was younger???
My critiques are it felt a little repetitive at times. It's also hard to communicate "Everyone else is wrong, I'm actually right about this" without sounding kind of annoying, but I think he balanced it well. I really wish he had discussed the evolution of concealed ovulation in humans because it seems to be a big part of how human sexuality developed.
My critiques are it felt a little repetitive at times. It's also hard to communicate "Everyone else is wrong, I'm actually right about this" without sounding kind of annoying, but I think he balanced it well. I really wish he had discussed the evolution of concealed ovulation in humans because it seems to be a big part of how human sexuality developed.
February 19, 2022
Decided on 4. Enjoyed reading, used my brain, and learned so many random and fun facts. My own issue with the logic here is that the author seems to hang his whole hope on the fact that Darwin proposed the sexual selection mate choice theory and therefore We should all revert back to that..simply because it’s Darwinian. There are plenty of examples of brilliant scientists who proposed 4/5 correct theories and 1 bonkers one lol. Regardless, Prum does a good job of backing up his theory of the importance of female mate choice and aesthetic pressures later on in the book I just wish he’d harp less on the Darwinian thing.
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