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Richard O. Prum

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us Hardcover – May 9, 2017

by Richard O. Prum (Author)

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A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL

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.

Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Doubleday
Publication date

May 9, 2017
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0385537212
ISBN-13

978-0385537216
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Prum's argument is exhilarating . . . The Evolution of Beauty should be widely read, as it will provoke readers, shaking them (as reading Hume did to Kant) from their dogmatic slumbers . . . I don’t see how any biologist could read this book and not walk away at least questioning the idea that adaptation must explain every last trait. Survival of the fittest might not be enough to explain nature. We might need survival of the prettiest, too."
—Sam Kean, Wall Street Journal

"Prum draws on decades of study, hundreds of papers, and a lively, literate, and mischievous mind . . . a delicious read, both seductive and mutinous . . . Prum's attention never strays far from nature, and his writing [about birds] is minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual."
—David Dobbs, New York Times Book Review

"The single most provocative book I read this year, one of those books that changes the way you look at everything . . . Everything about this book is unexpected, including the prose–fine and often funny."
—Michael Pollan

“The Evolution of Beauty is at once fascinating, provocative, and totally compelling. Anyone interested in science or art or sex—which is to say everyone—will want to read it.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“A fascinating account of beauty and mate choice in birds and other animals. You’ll be amazed by the weird things that birds do to win mates. You’ll also discover why both men and women have armpit hair, why men lack the penis bone widespread in other mammals, and what really happened in the Garden of Eden.”
—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

"A major intellectual achievement that should hasten the adoption of a more expansive style of evolutionary explanation that Darwin himself would have appreciated."
—Nick Romeo, Washington Post

“A smorgasbord of evolutionary biology, philosophy, and sociology, filtered through Prum’s experiences as a birdwatcher and his diverse research on everything from dinosaur colors to duck sex. Through compelling arguments and colorful examples, Prum launches a counterstrike against the adaptationist regime, in an attempt to ‘put the subjective experience of animals back in the center of biology’ and to ‘bring beauty back to the sciences.’”
—Ed Yong, The Atlantic

“Prum’s career has been diverse and full, so that reading this fascinating book, we learn about the patterning of dinosaur feathers, consider the evolutionary basis of the human female orgasm, the tyranny of academic patriarchy, and the corkscrewed enormity of a duck’s penis. Combining this with in-depth study of how science selects the ideas it approves of and fine writing about fieldwork results in a rich, absorbing text . . . The dance Prum performs to convince you to take him on as an intellectual partner is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms.”
—Adrian Barnett, New Scientist

"Reads like a memoir, argues like a manifesto, and shines with Prum's passion for all things ornithological."
—Erika Lorraine Milam, Science

“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 us into this universe of delights to discover a fascinating idea: that beauty is central to the history of life.”
—Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex and Evolution: Making Sense of Life

About the Author

RICHARD O. PRUM is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. He has conducted field work throughout the world, and has studied fossil theropod dinosaurs in China. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 3
Manakin Dances

How, and why, has beauty changed within and among bird species over the course of millions of years? What determines what any given species finds beautiful? What, in short, is the evolutionary history of avian beauty?

These questions might seem impossible to answer, but we actually have many of the scientific tools we need to address them productively. One of the challenges to understanding the evolution of beauty is the complexity of animal displays and mating preferences. Fortunately, we do not need to invent a trendy new brand of “systems science” in order to investigate these complex aesthetic repertoires, because the science of natural history—the observation and description of the lives of organisms in their natural environments—provides us with exactly the tools we need. Natural history was a critical component of Darwin’s scientific method and remains a bedrock foundation of much of evolutionary biology today.

Once we have gathered information about individual species, we need other scientific methods to compare and analyze them and to uncover their complicated, often hierarchical evolutionary histories. The scientific discipline that enables us to do that is called phylogenetics. Phylogeny is the history of evolutionary relationships among organisms—what Darwin called the “great Tree of Life.”

Darwin proposed that discovery of the Tree of Life should become a major branch of evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, research interest in phylogeny was largely abandoned by evolutionary biology during most of the twentieth century. However, powerful new methods for reconstructing and analyzing phylogenies have been developed in recent decades, which has led to a revival of interest. So, now that the two critical intellectual tools necessary to study the evolution of beauty—natural history and phylogenetics—are available, there has never been a better time to be asking questions about how beauty, and the taste for it, evolve.

Doing so will help us to understand the process of evolutionary radiation—diversification among species—in a new way. In evolutionary biology, adaptive radiation is the process by which a single common ancestor evolves through natural selection into a diversity of species that have a great variety of ecologies or anatomical structures. The amazing diversity of Darwin’s Finches (Geospizinae) on the Galápagos Islands is a canonical example of adaptive radiation. In this chapter, however, we will investigate another group of birds—the neotropical manakins—in order to understand a different kind of evolutionary process: aesthetic radiation. Aesthetic radiation is the process of diversification and elaboration from a single common ancestor through some mechanism of aesthetic selection—especially mate choice. Aesthetic radiation does not preclude the occurrence of adaptive mate choice, but also includes arbitrary mate choice for sexual beauty alone, with all of its often dramatic coevolutionary consequences.

The science of beauty requires that we get out of the laboratory and the museum and into the field. Fortunately, my bird-watching youth was great basic training for doing natural history research on birds in the field. I discovered the second critical element of this branch of beauty studies—phylogenetics—as an undergraduate at Harvard University. My immersion in formal ornithological studies began in the fall of 1979 with a freshman seminar, the Biogeography of South American Birds taught by Dr. Raymond A. Paynter Jr., the curator of birds at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). Dr. Paynter introduced me to the intellectual magic of natural history museums. Up on the fifth floor of the huge and ancient brick building that housed the Bird Department was a series of rooms where hundreds of thousands of scientific bird specimens were curated. During my undergraduate years, the MCZ was my intellectual home. I hung out a lot in the bird collections doing bibliographic work and curatorial tasks for Paynter and generally smelling like mothballs.

Dr. Paynter himself was far too intellectually conservative and cautious to be interested in the revolutionary new field of phylogenetics. But I soon discovered that the latest concepts and methods in this field were being hotly debated downstairs in the Romer Library in the weekly meetings of the Biogeography and Systematics Discussion Group. In retrospect, this time at Harvard was a golden era for phylogenetics. From the meetings of this “revolutionary cell” in the Romer Library, multiple graduate students went out into the world and made fundamental contributions to the field, helping to bring phylogeny back into the mainstream of evolutionary biology.

My own work was profoundly shaped by those weekly discussions in the early 1980s. I became fascinated by phylogenetic methods and eager to reconstruct avian family trees. For my senior honors project, I worked on the phylogeny and biogeography of toucans and barbets. Working at a desk I made for myself on a big table beneath the towering skeleton of an extinct moa in room 507 of the bird collection, I was excited to make observations of toucan plumage and skeletal characters and to construct my first phylogenies. I am happy to say that I have been continuously associated with world-class scientific collections of birds ever since. Only, I don’t smell like mothballs anymore.

As graduation approached, I was casting about for what to do next, searching for a research program that would combine my bird-watching skills and passion with my new obsession with avian phylogeny. Before going on to graduate school, I was desperate to get to South America and to see more of the birds I had met in the drawers at the MCZ. (There were very few tropical bird field guides in those days, so browsing through a museum collection was actually the best way to learn about the birds before actually seeing them in real life.) Intrigued by the Harvard graduate student Jonathan Coddington’s research using the phylogeny of spiders to test hypotheses about the evolution of orb-web-weaving behavior, I wanted to make a similar use of phylogeny to study the evolution of bird behavior.

At about that time, I met Kurt Fristrup, a Harvard graduate student, who had worked on the behavior of the flamboyantly orange Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock (Rupicola rupicola, Cotingidae) (color plate 5), one of the planet’s most amazing birds. Kurt suggested, “Why don’t you go to Suriname to map manakin leks?” In retrospect, this was one of the most consequential pieces of professional advice I ever received.

On a thin branch twenty-five feet high in the sun-dappled understory of a tropical rain forest in Suriname perches a tiny glossy black bird with a brilliantly golden yellow head, bright white eyes, and ruby-red thighs—a male Golden-headed Manakin (Ceratopipra erythrocephala)(color plate 6). He weighs about a third of an ounce (ten grams), or a bit less than two U.S. quarters. He has a short neck and short tail, giving him a compact body, but he has a nervous energy that belies his almost dumpy appearance. He sings a high, soft, descending whistled puuu and peers intently around, hyperaware of his surroundings. In moments, a second male whistles back from his perch in an adjacent tree, and then a third nearby. The male answers immediately. His social environment is obviously the focus of his keen attention. In all, there are five males clustered together in the forest. They are obscured from one another by foliage, but they are all within earshot of each other.

In response to the neighboring calls, the first male draws himself up into a statuesque upright posture with his light-colored bill pointing upward. After singing an energetic, syncopated, and raspy puu-prrrrr-pt! call, he suddenly flies from his perch to another branch twenty-five yards away. After a few seconds, he flies rapidly back to his main perch singing an accelerating crescendo of seven or more kew calls in flight. His flight path traces a subtle S-curve trajectory, first down below the level of the perch and then up above it. He lands on the perch from above while uttering a sharp buzzy szzzkkkt! Immediately upon landing, the male lowers his head, holds his body horizontal to the branch, and raises his rear up with his legs extended, revealing bright red thighs against his black belly, like a provocatively colored pair of breeches. He then slides backward along the perch in the tiny rapid steps of an elegant “moonwalk,” as if on roller skates. In the middle of the moonwalk, he flicks his rounded black wings open vertically above his back for a moment. After sliding backward for twelve inches along the branch, the male suddenly lowers and fans his tail, flicks his wings vertically again, and resumes his normal posture.

Moments later, the second male Golden-headed Manakin flies in and perches on another branch about five yards away. The first male immediately flies to join him, and they sit quietly side by side—but facing away from each other—in the dramatic upright posture. Intense, competitive, but mutually tolerant, the two males are deeply engaged with each other.

This scene is just a few moments in the bizarre social world of a Golden-headed Manakin lek. A lek is an aggregation of male display territories. Lekking males defend territories, but these territories lack any resources that females might need for reproduction other than sperm: no significant food, nest sites, nest materials, or other material assistance to the female. Golden-headed Manakins defend individual territories between five and ten yards wide, with two to five such territories grouped together. Leks are essentially sites where males put themselves on display in order to lure females to mate with them. Over the breeding season, individual females visit one or more leks, observe male displays, evaluate these displays, and then choose one of those males as their mate.

Lek breeding is a form of polygyny (one male with many potential mates) that results from female mate choice. In a lek-breeding system, females can select any mate they want, and they are often nearly unanimous in preferring a small fraction of the available males. So a relatively few males get to mate with a relatively large number of females. The skew in mating success is rather like the contemporary skew in income distribution. The most sexually successful males are very successful and account for half or more of all the matings, while other males will never have any opportunity to mate in a given year. Some males go their whole lives without mating.

After mating, female manakins build nests, lay clutches of two eggs, incubate them, and care for the developing young entirely on their own without any help from the males, whose contributions to reproduction end with their sperm donations. Because females do all the work, they don’t depend on the males for anything, and their independence allows them almost total sexual autonomy. This freedom of mate choice has allowed extreme preferences to evolve; females only choose the few males whose behavioral and morphological features meet their very high standards. The rest will be losers in the mating game. Thus the aesthetic extremity of male manakins is an evolutionary consequence of extreme aesthetic failure, which results from strong sexual selection by mate choice.

Female manakins have been choosing their mates in leks for about fifteen million years. Over the course of time, the features they have preferred have evolved into an extraordinary diversity of traits and behaviors among the approximately fifty-four species of manakins distributed from southern Mexico to northern Argentina. Manakin leks are among nature’s most creative and extreme laboratories of aesthetic evolution. For me, they proved the perfect place to study Beauty Happening.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; First Edition (May 9, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385537212
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385537216
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.9 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #520,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #247 in Ornithology (Books)
- #835 in General Sexual Health
- #1,778 in Sex & Sexuality

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evolution of charm and sensory delight

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 26, 2021

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“The Evolution of Beauty” satisfies every readers who like controversies, who love wonder of nature, and who want to elucidate about mysterious human beings. Richard O. Prum stresses a profound joy - of savoir and connaissance - created by the convergence of book learning and life experience. Evolutionary theory has been directed spotlight on an adaptation side so far. Prum claims evolution is frequently far quirkier, stranger, more historically contingent, individualized, and less predictable and generalizable than adaptation can explain. He insists Darwin himself well knew of this fact. How did beauty, and the taste for it, evolve? Female sexual autonomy, he says, is predominantly responsible for the evolution of natural beauty. He picks up biology and ecology of argus pheasant, manakins, and bowerbirds. We can confirm their eloquent mate selecting traits through moving pictures on Youtube. Mate selection is a good opportunity to solve a collision of interest between males and females. These birds tell us aesthetic coevolution has had a powerful, innovative, and decisive impact on the quantity and form of biological diversity. Leks and coordinated display are likely the result of female preferences for socially cooperative aesthetic gathering of males. Sexual autonomy matters in nature. When sexual success is determined by mate choice, survival is not the only priority in life. He explains violent struggle between males and females of ducks. Unselected male ducks become coercive in copulation. The result are continuously developed measures and countermeasures over initiative in mating. He thinks social monogamy of penis-free birds are strongly correlated with female sexual autonomy.

How did we become human? How did a sense of beauty happen in our soul? Our idea about beauty is slightly different between peoples depend on cultural, social, and geographical conditions. Prum claims Darwin has discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. Our sexual behavior is full of wonder comparing those of our primate brothers. Prum asserts we have a better account of our becoming human by including aesthetic female mate choice, sexual coercion, and female autonomy in the evolution of humans. He takes orgasm and same-sex behavior as an object of study. He explains the possibility of arbitrary, aesthetic mate choice might play a great role in developing sensory experience. Males have been evolutionarily de-weaponized and only culturally rearmed in nature. Opposing to this trend, patriarchal culture in human society - male power, sexual domination, and social hierarchy - has developed to reassert male control over fertilization, reproduction, and parental investment as countermeasures. These countermeasures, he thinks, prevented modern women from fully consolidating the previous evolutionary gains in sexual autonomy. Permanent breast tissue is unique to humans, he claims, and is likely an aesthetic traits that has evolved by male mate choice. He assumes cultural mating preferences can create feedback loops that result in the evolutionary elaboration of aesthetic value. When sexual autonomy is abridged or disrupted by coercion or violence, he says, mate choice itself can provide the evolutionary leverage to assert and expand the freedom of choice. Female sexual pleasure and orgasm has been evolved as an accession of female desire and choice. Male same-sex behavior evolved on its way to advance female sexual autonomy as female aesthetic remodeling of maleness. Female same-sex behavior is a defensive, aesthetic, and adaptive response to the direct and indirect costs of coercive male control over reproduction. Female choice expanded to encompass the broader social personality and social relationship experience, ultimately resulting in the evolution of male paternal investment.

Prum’s phrase “we humans can appreciate their beauty, but we have played no role in shaping it” resonate gravely after closing the book.

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Gary Moreau, Author

Birds + evolution = 5. As a book about the universe, it's a 6

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 12, 2018

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I am rather late to this book, having stumbled across it in reference, and several reviewers have already provided a very thorough synopsis of its theme and contents.

My take, however, is much broader than the fascinating debate over adaptive selection and beauty happens. To me this book spoke beautifully to the duality of the universe and everything in it. Birds and the debate over adaptive versus aesthetic selection are but two layers of context in which this far larger duality exists.

In this perspective, every coin has two sides. For every pro there is a con. For every this there is a that. In the Chinese worldview, for every yin there is a yang (male/female, fire/water, hot/cold, etc.).

But which side of the duality is true?

Eastern philosophers, who see the world inductively, would argue that it’s an and/but question. The truth is not one-dimensional. It is defined by the balance, or imbalance, as the case may be, between the two.

Western scientists, however, have a more deductive worldview and tend to see the world through the binary lens of either/or. Which is why, as Professor Prum so clearly explains, they tend to rally around what is most broadly accepted as the most likely of the two explanations, likely being a statistically probabilistic but far from certain choice which scientists call the null hypothesis or the null model.

Philosopher Karl Popper popularized the adage, “If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not scientific.” While that sounds reasonable enough, and it is the key to scientific efficiency, the result of that conclusion is exactly what Prum acknowledges. Most scientific research merely confirms the pre-existing bias of the null hypothesis. It often does little to uncover previously undiscovered truth.

And the reason is that where logic meets mathematics, which is where debates are normally settled, science is asymmetrical. It is not neutral. The game of proving anything scientifically is decidedly rigged.

Now, to be fair, it almost has to be, if we’re ever going to advance science at all. Which is why we are hard wired to find patterns in data even where none exist. And we’re wired to do it as quickly as possible.

The game of scientific discovery, in other words, is less a game of discovery than explanation. Which is also why the popular kids get the most likes on social media and large groups of people—take your pick of examples—can be so easily duped. Psychologists call it precognitive conclusion. We see what we expect to see. Or, more accurately, we see what we allow ourselves to see.

I think this is a truly fascinating book and I thought the author did a superb job of both laying out his argument and arguing on its behalf. I am sold! Although I have to admit that I am very naturally attracted to it being true as it makes the world a far more interesting place, so perhaps I, too, am concluding a bit precognitively.

It is a bit long-winded, and Prum sometimes sounds a bit judgmental about the people who have been so judgmental about him. But we always think that when we listen to someone supporting a contrarian perspective on any null hypothesis we support. It’s the nature of language, or the beast, or the bird, in this case.

Part of the reason for the length is that Professor Prum expands the narrative into both feminism and his call for a “post-human” view of art. While I was admittedly ready to wrap it up by then, I agree with his positions.

In fact, one aspect of his position I hold particularly dear. When we look at developments like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, these issues are much bigger than misogyny and racism. These are issues of power and, specifically, how we define and allocate it. That is what has to change. More laws and protections aren’t going to make a difference. We must dismantle the current white patriarchal power structure and define power in a much more inclusive, just, and productive way. Prum is right; that will require that we put an end to the monotheism of adaptive selection. Whether we call it aesthetic selection or beauty happens, we must expand our worldview—politically, scientifically, and philosophically.

I am not a birder. But I thank Professor Prum and the many scientists he covers in this book for drawing me in to the world of birds in the same way that Carl Sagan used to draw us into the wonder of the cosmos. It’s a fascinating book and I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

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Top reviews from other countries

Blue axolotl

A frustrating, partisan book written by a very knowledgeable scientist

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 16, 2021

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This is a very frustrating book, its subject is sexual selection with in depth examples of birds. But it quickly veers off to a polemic, from sexual selection to "evolution of beauty". Beauty is never actually defined and in my view this is a major drawback, if you want to discuss beauty you could at least say what it is. Birds may be beautiful for us but I am sure sexual selection occurs as well in creature we may find less attractive, maybe male cockroaches find females pretty or the other way around? And then it veers again in a social and ethical realm. The evolution of beauty is a way of liberating females and LBGT people and fight market economics! That is plain dumb. The author obviously didn't consider the downside of sexual selection, the many creatures that are just not attractive enough or strong enough. He has never been a wallflower at a party. Very frustrating that such an obviously knowledgeable scientist wrote this as a pamphlet rather than a way to open science to more people. I'll blame it on America's tribal wars...

One person found this helpful

Davide Ferrara

Definitely worth a read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 10, 2017

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This is a very interesting book and perspective on how humans (and all living beings / animals) have come to define "Beauty". It sort of builds on the type of approach taken to social science put forward by Geertz ("The Interpretation of Cultures", especially the first part of that book), but takes a different focus, if not entirely different epistemological developmental view. Was interesting to learn that Darwin originally put this forward as -- as the title implies -- not many have pursued this particular aspect of Darwin's work. Worth reading if one wishes to understand more about the core origins and depth of key aspects of human (and general) nature. It doesn't get more "core" than "mate choice", does it?

One person found this helpful

Ralph Hepworth

A remarkable book well worth reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 26, 2018

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This is a remarkable book. It's a bit of an effort to get into it but well worth it. The author shares his passion for birds with conviction and you will find out more about the way ducks have sex then you ever thought there was to know. Then the author gets going and sets out his belief that evolution of beauty – 'beauty happens' in his words – occurs via it parallel and linked selection mechanism to utilitarian natural selection. His presentation is always well-founded and soundly argued - and thoroughly convincing. He makes speculative forays – and is always clear where he is doing this – into human sexuality amongst other things. This last chunk of the book is exciting and I found it hard to put it down. Well done Prof Prum; I'd give your book a six rating if I could.

Concobus

A confused book. Only worth reading for people who already know enough about evolution to be able to parse the nonsense

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 31, 2018

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I have a PhD in evolutionary biology. Like many evolutionary biologists, I will note that there are a number of serious problems with this book. The good press is mostly coming from reporters, not biologists. It's not all bad, but overall, I cannot recommend even the bird sections of this book because the content related to evolution is deeply confused.

Here are some of the problems. This is not an exhaustive list. There are many more problems than I can list here.

First, Prum misrepresents opposition to Fisher's model of runaway selection. Runaway selection and arbitrary female choice are presented in introductory evolutionary biology textbooks (e.g. Futuyma & Kirkpatrick), and in what is probably the most popular biology book of all time ("The Selfish Gene"). This is not some forgotten secret that has laid dormant and untaught in evolutionary biology for decades. It is fair to say that most evolutionary biologists do not accept the ubiquity of runaway selection, but this is on the basis of (lack of) evidence. Prum asks us to accept runaway selection as the "null model" for sexual selection, despite there being more arguments against its ubiquity than for it, and despite it not producing testable quantitative predictions (unlike the neutral theory of molecular evolution, which is Prum's point of comparison for a null model).

Second, Prum ignores evidence against his position and misrepresents the arguments of his opponents. Runaway selection on arbitrary traits cannot work if there is a cost to female choice. Prum does not tell us this, even though--as other reviewers have pointed out--it essentially disproves the entire premise of the book. That's quite the omission! As an example of misrepresenting his opponents, at one point, Prum misrepresents Alan Grafen, who said that accepting Fisher's model in opposition to honest signalling models would be "methodologically wicked". What he meant by this is simply that accepting a non-adaptationist hypothesis represents the end of inquiry. It's like shrugging your shoulders and saying "I don't know what this trait could be good for, therefore it must be good for nothing." That kind of argument from ignorance is not how science progresses. You need to make hypotheses and try to knock them down.

Third, at one point, it becomes clear that Prum has not understood the arguments against his position. For example, when discussing Zahavi's handicap principle, Prum asks why male animals do not seem to evolve true handicaps such as missing limbs in order to signal their high quality. This shows that Prum has not understood at all what an "honest signal" is. An honest signal is a *reliable* indicator of male quality. The reason that males do not evolve missing limbs is that a male with bad genes can just as easily have a missing limb as a male with good genes. Therefore, there would be selection against females accepting missing limbs as a signal because it would lead them to being easily fooled about the quality of their mate. This kind of easily faked signal is not evolutionarily stable. Instead, natural selection will cause females to rely on *honest signals*: signals that are easy for good males to produce but hard for bad males to produce. That Prum does not know this shows that he does not understand the arguments against his position or that he is choosing to misrepresent them.

Fourth, Prum's appeal to consequences in rejecting the "good genes" model of mate choice is deplorable. Prum says we must reject this model in order to divorce evolutionary biology from eugenics. No! What we must do is judge the truth of each model based on the EVIDENCE. Prum's fallacious line of argument here has long been used by creationists to reject evolutionary theory in its entirety.

Fifth, Prum's own speculations on human sociobiology are deeply irresponsible in my opinion. For example, he admits that none of the mathematical models behind the material he is proposing have been published so he doesn't really know if what he is proposing is even theoretically possible. But then he says "humans likely [this]" and "humans likely [that]" on the basis of essentially zero evidence. It's all his untested pet theory.

Et cetera. If you read this book, know that what you are reading is not an honest representation of the state of evolutionary biology. This book is pushing the author's viewpoint, and in my opinion stretches the boundaries of the truth in order to do so. By the end of the book, you get the sense that his motivation for writing the book may have been based largely based on two things: 1) his personal politics, 2) his resentment at having had his viewpoints criticized in peer review (by experts who know better) and a desire to bypass the peer-reviewed journals and "win the argument" by appealing directly to the public.

Give this one a pass.

6 people found this helpful

animal lover

Prum argues for Darwin's suppressed theory of the evolutionary significance of female choice

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 18, 2017

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loved this book! Prum has brought notice to Darwin's theory of evolution through beauty and mate choice. Darwin proposed aesthetics as a shared biological and cultural trait across lifeforms. He based this thought on observations of bird plumage and mating traditions. Darwin argued that females of bird species choose beautiful displays of males, and this results in physical adaptations. Also, the aesthetic qualities of cultural traditions enacted by the males are chosen by females, and this results in the adaptation in the species’ cultures. The theory was largely suppressed until recently because of its feminist implications—females leading evolutionary adaptation—and because it acknowledged conscious choice in animals. Prum's book is a welcome addition to aesthetic evolutionary theory and ecofeminism.

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The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us Hardcover – May 9, 2017

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