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Summary
What can explain the incredible diversity of beauty in nature? Richard O. Prum, an award-winning ornithologist, discusses Charles Darwin's second and long-neglected theory--aesthetic mate choice--and what it means for our understanding of evolution. In addition, Prum connects those same evolutionary dynamics to the origins and diversity of human sexuality, offering riveting new thinking about the evolution of human beauty and the role of mate choice,...
3) A most interesting problem: what Darwin's Descent of man got right and wrong about human evolution
Summary
"In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for biological evolution in his most famous work, On the Origin of Species. However, Origin makes little mention of humans. Despite this, Darwin thought deeply about humans and in 1871 published The Descent of Man, his influential and controversial book in which he applied evolutionary theory to humans and detailed his theory of sexual selection. February 2021 will mark the 150th anniversay of it's publication....
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A leading zoologist takes a fierce and often humorous look at the females of the animal kingdom and subverts the prevailing opinion among evolutionary biologists who have insisted that males are more interesting.
Humans are locked in a battle over sex and gender: one side argues that evolutionary biology dictates how we should be, and the other that it's a patriarchal tool that shouldn't matter at all. Rewriting the science of evolution and sex,...
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Are animals able to appreciate what humans refer to as "beauty"? The term scarcely appears nowadays in a scientific description of living things, but we humans may nonetheless find the colors, patterns, and songs of animals to be beautiful in apparently the same way that we see beauty in works of art. In this book, the author describes how the colors and patterns displayed by animals arise, what they communicate, and how they function in the social...
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In 1871, more than a decade after he unveiled the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin laid out the principles of sexual selection. He suggested that alongside the traits that enable species to survive are those that confer sexual advantage on individuals within the species and thus insure greater transmission to offspring of those individuals' genes. Focusing on some of the most resplendent birds in the avian class - among them ducks, pheasants, grouse,...
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Bondar examines the sex lives of our animal cousins, which are fiendishly difficult, infinitely varied, and often violent. They involve razor sharp penises, murderous cannibals, and chemical warfare in an epic battle between the sexes. Like us, animals must first find the perfect partner. You think we have it tough? Try having to do it while being hunted down by predators, against a backdrop of unpredictable or life-threatening conditions. Then, sperm...
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From one of the world's leading authorities on animal behavior, the astonishing story of how the female brain drives the evolution of beauty in animals and humans.
"Darwin developed the theory of sexual selection to explain why the animal world abounds in stunning beauty, from the brilliant colors of butterflies and fishes to the songs of birds and frogs. He argued that animals have "a taste for the beautiful" that drives their potential mates to...
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In The Descent of Man Darwin addresses many of the issues raised by his notorious Origin of Species: finding in the traits and instincts of animals the origins of the mental abilities of humans, of language, of our social structures and our moral capacities, he attempts to show that there is no clear dividing line between animals and humans. Most importantly, he accounts for what Victorians called the 'races' of mankind by means of what he calls
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ANTHROPOLOGY. We all know about the birds and the bees, but what about the ancient placoderm fishes and the dinosaurs? The history of sex is as old as life itself--and as complicated and mysterious. And despite centuries of study there is always more to know. In 2008, paleontologist John A. Long and a team of researchers revealed their discovery of a placoderm fish fossil, known as "the mother fish, " which at 380 million years old revealed the oldest...