Contemporary Authors

• The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us Doubleday (New York, NY), 2017

1. The evolution of beauty : how Darwin's forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world-- and us LCCN 2016050808 Type of material Book Personal name Prum, Richard O., author. Main title The evolution of beauty : how Darwin's forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world-- and us / Richard O. Prum. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Doubleday, [2017] Description 428 pages : illustrations (some color), map ; 25 cm ISBN 9780385537216 (hbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER QL761 .P744 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Prum Lab - http://prumlab.yale.edu/

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  Prum with Rupicola
  Prum with Rupicola

  I am an evolutionary ornithologist with broad interests in avian biology. I have done research on diverse topics, including avian phylogenetics, behavioral evolution, feather evolution and development, sexual selection and mate choice, sexual conflict, aesthetic evolution, avian color vision, structural color, carotenoid pigmentation, evolution of avian plumage coloration, historical biogeography, avian mimicry, and the theropod dinosaur origin of birds. For more details see my Research pages.

  I have conducted field work throughout the Neotropics and in Madagascar, and have studied fossil theropods in China.

  At Yale, I am the Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. I have previously served as Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (2008-2011).

  I am currently the Director of Franke Program in Science and the Humanities (http://www.yale.edu/whc/frankeprogram.html), which is a new initiative at Yale that aims to foster communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines. The Franke Program sponsored lectures, events, workshops, and courses that span the major traditional division of the university. It is made possible by the generosity of Richard (‘53) and Barbara Franke.

  Education

  Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. A.B. Cum Laude in Biology, 1982.

  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ph.D. in Biological Sciences, 1989.

  Work Experience

  2004 to Present

  William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

  Curator of Ornithology, and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

  2012 to Present

  Director, Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

  2008-2011

  Chair, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

  1991 - 2003

  Assistant Professor (1991-1997), Associate Professor (1997-2003), and Professor (2003), Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and Curator of Ornithology, Natural History Museum, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.

  1989 - 1991

  Chapman Fellow, Department of Ornithology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York.

  Honors and Awards

  2010 - 2014 MacArthur Fellowship, John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois.

  2011 - 2012 Ikerbasque Research Fellowship, Basque Foundation for Science, at the Donostia International Physics Center, San Sebastian, Pais Vasco, Spain.

  2007 - 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY.

  2001 - 2002 Fulbright Scholar Award, United States Department of State. Six month research and teaching award at the Universidade Estadual do Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil.

  Teaching

  At Yale University, I now teach and undergraduate class in Ornithology and graduate seminars in macroevolution. I have previously taught undergraduate classes in Evolution, the Diversity of Life, Evolutionary, an undergraduate seminar in Bird Behavior, and graduate training in the Ethical Conduct of Research.

  Undergraduates interested in doing independent independent research can contact me anytime.

  Contact

  Richard O. Prum, Ph.D.
  William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology,
  Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
  Peabody Museum of Natural History

  email: richard.prum@yale.edu
  phone: 203-432-9423
  fax: 203-432-5176

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• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Prum

  Richard Prum
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Richard Prum
  Born c. 1961[citation needed]
  Citizenship United States
  Alma mater University of Michigan
  Known for Evolution of feathers
  Scientific career
  Fields Evolutionary biology, ornithology
  Institutions Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University
  Thesis (1989)
  Richard 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.[1]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Life and work
  2 Reception
  3 Awards
  4 Works
  5 References
  6 Bibliography
  7 External links
  Life and work[edit]
  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.[1]

  Prum holds that birds are the living descendants of theropod dinosaurs, a previously highly disputed finding that has increasingly gained broad acceptance in the ornithological and evolutionary biology scientific communities.[2][3]

  Prum grew up in rural Vermont and took his bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1983, and received his Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Michigan. After gradually losing his hearing throughout the early 1990s due to illness, Prum moved from primarily doing field work to conducting research on plumage pigmentation, feather evolution, and Darwin's sexual selection theory.[4] He released a book in 2017 on the role of beauty in natural selection: The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – And Us.[5]

  Reception[edit]
  In his book Survival of the Beautiful, David Rothenberg reflects on Prum's analysis of sexual selection in birds, considering whether female birds are exercising an aesthetic sense when they choose a mate. In a chapter titled "It could be anything", Rothenburg argues Prum's position, that the females' aesthetic choice is essentially arbitrary and decoupled from natural selection: anything the females begin to choose becomes what the males must have if they are to have any offspring.[6] The aesthetic aspect of sexual selection has been debated since the start of Darwinism in the nineteenth century. Prum is following Edward Bagnall Poulton, who was roundly criticised by Alfred Russel Wallace for asserting "female preferences based on aesthetic considerations".[7] In Rothenberg's words, Wallace "had no place for Darwin's love of beauty, caprice, and feminine whim".[8] Prum on the other hand considers art and male sexual display to be "coevolution of the work and its appreciation".[9]

  Awards[edit]
  2007 - 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship
  2009 MacArthur Fellows Program
  Works[edit]
  From 1985 onwards, Prum has authored research papers including:[10]

  Prum, R.O (December 15, 1999), "Development and Evolutionary Origin of Feathers" (PDF), Journal of Experimental Zoology (Molecular and Developmental Evolution), 285 (4): 291–306, PMID 10578107, doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-010X(19991215)285:4<291::AID-JEZ1>3.0.CO;2-9
  Xu, X., H. H. Zhou, and R. O. Prum (2001), "Branched integumental structures in Sinornithosaurus and the origin of feathers", Nature, 410 (6825): 200–204, PMID 11242078, doi:10.1038/35065589
  Matthew P. Harris; John F. Fallon; Richard O. Prum (2002), "Shh-Bmp2 signaling module and the evolutionary origin and diversification of feathers", Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution, 294 (2): 160–176, doi:10.1002/jez.10157
  Prum, Richard O. & AH Brush (2002). "The evolutionary origin and diversification of feathers" (PDF). The Quarterly Review of Biology. 77 (3): 261–295. PMID 12365352. doi:10.1086/341993.
  Prum, R.O., & Brush, A.H. (March 2003), "Which Came First, the Feather or the Bird?" (PDF), Scientific American, 288 (3): 84–93, PMID 12616863, doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0303-84
  Bostwick, Kimberly S. & Richard O. Prum (2005), "Courting Bird Sings with Stridulating Wing Feathers" (PDF), Science, 309 (5735): 736, PMID 16051789, doi:10.1126/science.1111701
  Geoffrey Edward Hill, Kevin J. McGraw, eds. (2006). "Anatomy, Physics, and Evolution of Structural Colors". Bird Coloration: Mechanisms and measurements. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01893-8.
  Vinther, Jakob; Derek E. G. Briggs; Julia Clarke; Gerald Mayr; Richard O. Prum (2009). "Structural coloration in a fossil feather" (PDF). Biology Letters. 6 (1): 128–31. PMC 2817243 Freely accessible. PMID 19710052. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2009.0524.
  References[edit]
  ^ Jump up to: a b Richard O. Prum's profile, Yale University: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 2003, retrieved 7 July 2010
  Jump up ^ https://books.google.com/books?id=0AGTffepPccC&pg=PA128&dq=Richard+Prum&cd=8#v=onepage&q=Richard%20Prum&f=false
  Jump up ^ Prum, Richard O (April 2003), "Are current critiques of the theropod origin of birds science? Rebuttal to Feduccia (2002)" (PDF), The Auk, 120 (2): 550–561, doi:10.1642/0004-8038(2003)120[0550:ACCOTT]2.0.CO;2, retrieved 7 July 2010See also BNet version
  Jump up ^ http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/11-ornithologist-is-reshaping-ideas-of-how-beauty-evolves "Ornithologist Is Reshaping Ideas Of How Beauty Evolves" by Veronique Greenwood, Discover Magazine, 05 April 2015
  Jump up ^ Dobbs, David (September 18, 2017). "Survival of the Prettiest". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
  Jump up ^ Rothenberg, 2011. pp 74–101.
  Jump up ^ Wallace, Alfred Russel. Nature, 24 July 1890. pp 289–291.
  Jump up ^ Rothenberg, 2011. p 36.
  Jump up ^ Rothenberg, 2011. p 101.
  Jump up ^ Lists of Prum's published works
  Bibliography[edit]
  Rothenberg, David. Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution. Bloomsbury, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4088-2882-3
  External links[edit]
  "The nature of genius", Yale Daily News, Vivian Yee, Esther Zuckerman, October 9, 2009
  Categories: American ornithologistsMacArthur FellowsLiving peopleEvolutionary biologistsUniversity of Michigan alumniGuggenheim FellowsHarvard University alumniYale University faculty
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  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.

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  The bird-filled world of Richard Prum
  How an ornithologist discovered new kinds of color, proved T. rex had feathers, and answered the question “What is art?”
  By Cathy Shufro | Nov/Dec 2011
  Mark Ostow
  Mark Ostow
  Richard Prum, an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, is profoundly interdisciplinary in his approach to his work. View full image

  PRUM'S
  BELIEVE IT OR NOT

  Two-Voice Singing
  Birds sing with the syrinx, a unique organ formed usually at the junction of the trachea and the bronchi. Many birds can make and control two independent notes at the same time with the two sides of the syrinx, creating many of the richest and most acoustically complex vocal sounds in all of nature. —Richard Prum

  How Birds Breathe
  Bird lungs have a fixed volume of tiny tubes, and air runs in only one direction through the lungs. Birds breathe by moving the air through a series of special air sacs before and after it passes through the lungs. It takes two cycles of inhalation and exhalation for a single volume of air to travel into and out of the avian respiratory tract. —Richard Prum

  Navigation and Orientation
  Many birds migrate long distances, and they orient and navigate with surprising accuracy. Most migratory birds migrate without benefit of their parents, and must rely on entirely innate, rather than social, cues. Birds use a variety of celestial and magnetic compasses to distinguish directions, but the nature of the avian “map” remains largely unknown. —Richard Prum

  In the winter of 1999, Richard Prum sat his kids down on the couch and said: “Hey, I want you to remember that I told you something: T. rex had feathers.” His sons were seven, four, and two at the time, and “typical dino-fanatics.” They didn’t believe him. “They said, ‘No, no, Dad. T. rex didn’t have feathers.’ And I said, ‘It’s true. When you buy a T. rex toy for your kids, it’s going to have plumage.’”

  Prum was a professor at the University of Kansas, and he had just come home after a visit to Yale to see some newly discovered dinosaur fossils. They were tyrannosaur relatives, little ground-running theropods, and their bodies were covered with silky fluff—“dinofuzz,” he calls it. Scientists had been arguing for decades about whether birds had descended from theropod dinosaurs or from some ancient reptilian lineage like Crocodilia. Two Yale paleontologists, John Ostrom and Jacques Gauthier, had championed the dinosaur origin, and the 125-million-year-old Chinese fossils on loan at the Peabody seemed to clinch it. But so far no one had come up with a theory of feather evolution to back up the claim that dinofuzz was primitive plumage. Prum had that theory. The paper he wrote has been, ever since, the prevailing scientific view of how feathers evolved.

  Knowing only this piece of Prum’s work, one might assume he’s a specialist in theropod paleontology. But he’s not even a paleontologist. He is a consummate scholarly generalist. A dedicated, even fanatical, ornithologist who is now a professor at Yale, Prum takes his questions from birds and follows them wherever they lead. He began as a reasonably standard field biologist, but his own inclination for the new and unknown, as well as a freak medical crisis that deprived him of one of his most valuable field skills, made him change course. His intellectual peregrinations have led him to study, among many other things, color in birds and some mammals, the nature of sexual selection, and dinosaur coloration. He is currently involved in inventing a novel kind of blue paint. He is also developing a theory of art.

  “I work on ornithology as if it were an interdisciplinary program,” says Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology. “Avian Area Studies, if you will”—like Southeast Asia Studies, American Studies, and the other geographic and cultural area studies that bring together scholars from many different disciplines. “Sometimes Avian Area Studies requires physics. Sometimes, it requires evolution. Sometimes, it’s about culture; and sometimes, it’s about game theory.” It’s “making connections between fields not formerly thought to be interrelated.”

  When Ricky Prum was a child in Manchester, Vermont, in the early 1970s—this would be about 35 years before he’d win a MacArthur “genius” award—he occupied his mind by memorizing feats of gluttony listed in the Guinness World Records books: the largest number of whelks consumed in five minutes, that sort of thing. Then he got glasses.

  “All of a sudden, the world was in focus,” recalls Prum, whose thick bifocals frame eyes like slate blue marbles. “My curiosity latched onto birds almost immediately.” Not long after, he discovered a bird guide at a bookstore. “I said to my mom, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’ She said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, you’ve got a birthday coming up.” His tenth-birthday gift was the Golden Field Guide to Birds of North America.

  Prum befriended elderly bird-watchers because they had cars and driver’s licenses, “and they were delightful,” he says. “I grew up with old ladies,” he says. “They were a tremendous community of friends.” Out and about with his binoculars, Prum found that the sound of a bird’s singing is often the first clue that it’s nearby, so he began memorizing birdsongs, hundreds of them, by listening to LPs from the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. “I wore the grooves off those records. I became extraordinarily acoustic.”

  Why birds? Prum attributes his choice in part to a similarity between his “style of mind” and that of birds. Whereas mammals tend to be nocturnal and tactile, and reptiles are furtive and must be grabbed to be studied, birds are mostly out in the daylight and are acoustic and visual (like Prum, with his birdsong repertoire and his revelatory eyeglasses). He also loves the chase. “The great thing about bird watching is that it’s a hunt. You never know what you’re going to see. It’s so primal.”

  Prum went to Harvard and spent much of his time in its Museum of Comparative Zoology. “I smelled like mothballs for most of my undergraduate years,” he says. He had little patience for chemistry, physics, or math, and “ripped through my humanities courses as fast as I could. I was headed for South America to study birds.” When he began graduate school at the University of Michigan in 1984, he chose a group of neo-tropical birds, the manakin family, for a dissertation on courtship displays. Scientists knew very little about many of the 42 manakin species, and their songs had not been recorded. Prum hunted them down. He prepared by memorizing the known bird songs in each of his research areas—in Suriname, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Once there, he listened for songs he’d never heard. Eventually, Prum would construct a complete family tree showing the evolution of every species of manakin.

  Four years into graduate school, he spent the summer in Senegal with his girlfriend, filmmaker Ann Johnson, watching birds and helping out on her documentary about the Atlantic slave trade. On one of his last mornings there, he got up from bed and fell on his face. The room was furiously spinning, and his right ear roared with tinnitus. When he got back home, the doctors suspected a virus; their formal diagnosis, Prum says, was “idiopathic sudden hearing loss, which means ‘We don’t know what the hell causes it.’” Even after treatment with steroids, his right ear never recovered the ability to hear anything above 1200 to 1500 Hertz. As Prum puts it, the ear is deaf to “practically anything that isn’t a crow or the bottom half of a robin.” But his left ear was unharmed, and still so keen that an audiologist called it “bionic.”

  In 1987, he and Ann Johnson collaborated on a journal article on golden-winged manakins. They married three years later. Their careers have advanced in concert; once, when hiking in Australia, they met a fellow hiker who dropped to his knees in homage when he found out Ann had made the PBS documentary Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air. It’s a story Rick particularly likes to tell.

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Print Marked Items
On the origin of sexual attraction
Mark Cocker
New Statesman.
146.5372 (June 23, 2017): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text: 
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--and Us
Richard O Prum
Doubleday, 448pp. $30
In 1860, the year after Charles Darwin had published his On the Origin of Species, he privately confessed to a
colleague: "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick!" It doesn't take a genius
to work out the cause of Darwin's nausea.
Natural selection, as he had defined it, was assumed to modify the physical structure and function of a species'
composite parts, so that they were all adjusted to their environmental conditions. Overall, it was presumed to shape an
animal to make it better adapted to its life circumstances. But how on Earth could such a theory explain something as
gloriously impractical as the five-foot-long, eye-spotted upper-tail coverts of a male peacock? Far from leaving the
owner skilled at negotiating its environment or better at escaping predators, this ludicrous appendage appeared to make
it less able to survive. The peacock's tail seemed the most beautiful and elegant rebuttal of Darwin's arguments.
At least it did until, according to the author of this remarkable book, Darwin came up with the answer. It was an insight
every bit as world-defining as his original theory and he described it in a later book, The Descent of Man, and Selection
in Relation to Sex (1871). Darwin argued that another evolutionary force was at play among life in the way that
organisms select their prospective partners. Natural selection may lead to the survival of the fittest, but sexual selection,
as we now call this other mechanism, does not necessarily make a species better adapted.
Mate choices based on aesthetic criteria, of which the peacock's tail is a perfect example, can give rise to arbitrary, even
maladaptive characteristics. And not only does sexual selection lead to the acquisition of such useless adornments, it
also has a co-evolutionary impact on the desires expressed by the male peacock's mate. In short, what helps shape life
on Earth is the subjective feelings that operate largely within female organisms.
According to Prum, this is Darwin's truly "dangerous idea", and one that patriarchal Western scientific culture has
instinctively disliked. Prum explores in detail the antagonisms that sexual selection has aroused over the 150 years
since Darwin articulated the idea. While natural scientists from Alfred Russel Wallace to Richard Dawkins may have
accepted its existence, they have also sought to collapse its significance and make it a subsidiary element within the
general theory of natural selection.
They argue that mate choices may lead to beautiful and bizarre adornments but that these features are also "honest"
indicators of the good genes and vigorous health possessed by their male owners. Prum calls it the "beauty-as-utility
argument" and characterises it as a majority view, one to which he has been a lifelong opponent. In The Evolution of
Beauty he provides a detailed justification for his position, making his book both an objective description of how
sexual selection operates and a form of scientific autobiography. It also mimics Darwin's literary output in two crucial
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senses. Like his great hero did, it has taken Prum decades to assemble the hoard of supportive evidence that underpins
his views. He has also articulated his life's work in prose that is as lucid as the arguments are sophisticated: Darwin
couldn't have put it better himself.
The author is a lifelong birdwatcher and many of his favourite organisms feature strongly in the array of case studies
that make up a good deal of the book. But the bird family that launched Prum's scientific journey is a group of tiny,
intensely colourful Neotropical inhabitants called manakins. The males of the group perform a bizarre display that has
evolved under a severe form of sexual selection that Prum describes as 54 "distinctive 'ideals' of beauty".
One of the better-known of these birds is the red-capped manakin, which performs a dance routine said to resemble
Michael Jackson's moonwalk. Another, the blue manakin, often functioning in collaborative teams of up to seven
males, does a Catherine-wheel-like flutter past the dowdy female.
In their relatively long lives, as many as 90 per cent of male blue manakins may never get to mate. As Prum points out,
these birds "engage in the most ruthless sexual competition known in nature", but it is not a violent transaction
conducted with teeth a and horns. Appropriately for one of Brazil's n best-known birds, it involves a song-and-dance
number, of which the super-picky females are the ultimate arbiters.
What makes this book so absorbing is that Prum expands the range of his material to speculate on a panorama of
intriguing questions. To give a small sense of this eclectic span, he proposes that sexual selection could have played a
very important part in shaping feathers in dinosaurs and in the evolution of flight by their avian descendants, and that it
may even have led to the Old Testament story of how God made Adam's partner from a spare rib. According to Prum,
the real bone used to fashion Eve may have been a baculum, a penis bone, which is found in all primates except two
spider monkeys and ourselves.
Prum devotes the last third of his book to considering how mate choices may have been decisive in shaping aspects of
human physiology and behaviour. This is likely to provoke much of the attention that the book rightly deserves,
because here he dwells on the size and shape of the human penis, the existence of the female orgasm and the evolution
of same-sex sexual relationships, all of which are hard to explain through natural selection alone.
Prum's thoughts on these matters are compelling stuff, but the book's chief achievement is to challenge our relentlessly
anthropocentric perspective. The Evolution of Beauty enables us to see that the most intimate emotions and subjective
choices made by mere beasts are decisive subjects for science. And it is these aesthetic sensibilities, as owned and
operated by other animals, that have fashioned the manifold beauties of our world.
Mark Cocker's new book, "Our Place", will be published in 2018 by Jonathan Cape
Caption: How deep is your plume? Sexual selection has led to the male peacock's "gloriously impractical" tail
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cocker, Mark. "On the origin of sexual attraction." New Statesman, 23 June 2017, p. 46+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499720313&it=r&asid=2fac046563d9ec341c617d1fc45fa46c.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499720313
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508717397739 3/4
Prum, Richard O.: THE EVOLUTION OF
BEAUTY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Prum, Richard O. THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 5, 9 ISBN: 978-0-385-
53721-6
A robust defense of Charles Darwin's aesthetic theory of evolution.Prum (Ornithology/Yale Univ.), the head curator of
vertebrate zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, argues that natural selection is not the only
evolutionary mechanism at work in nature. Beauty and desire in nature are also dynamic forces, and those features in
males that females prefer in choosing mates evolve rapidly. In a nutshell, each species evolves its own standard of
beauty by which it chooses mates. After a brief discussion of the early and continued opposition to Darwin's aesthetic
theory, the author illustrates the role of beauty in bird mating by taking readers to Borneo to observe the rituals of the
Great Argus, a species of pheasant known as "one of the most aesthetically extreme animals on the planet," and to
Suriname, to see the displays of male manakins, which must meet the "very high standards" of potential female mates.
In other chapters, Prum reveals the intricate machinery involved in female bowerbirds choosing their mates. Female
ducks, it seems, may not have such autonomy. Readers may be in for a shock when Prum turns to duck sex, which can
be violent, involving what humans would call gang rape, and the illustrations of record-setting duck penises are eyeopening.
The author, who charmingly reveals his lifelong fascination with birds, does not base his argument solely on
avian evolution, however. In later chapters, he explores the role of female mate choice in primate evolution, a
challenging subject that he views as warranting further study. Throughout, the narrative is well-documented and wholly
accessible, enriched by the author's warm personal touches. Prum writes that his goal was to present the "full,
distinctive richness, complexity, and diversity of this aesthetic view of life." He absolutely succeeds, though fierce
debate will continue among evolutionary biologists.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Prum, Richard O.: THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485105091&it=r&asid=538efa2992eaa073088a8573e7277d6c.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105091
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508717397739 4/4
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's
Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the
Animal World--and Us
Publishers Weekly.
264.10 (Mar. 6, 2017): p51.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--and Us
Richard O. Prum. Doubleday, $30 (448p)
Machiavelli's ISBN 978-0-385-53721-6
Prum, a professor of ornithology at Yale, provocatively questions whether virtually all biologists have misunderstood a
core concept first proposed by Charles Darwin. As Prum explains, the vast majority of evolutionary biologists consider
sexual selection, in which females choose males with whom to mate, to be a type of natural selection. Male
ornamentation, such as peacock tail feathers, arises as a means to advertise health and virility. Using his own research
on tropical birds as a base, Prum follows Darwin in positing that such ornamentation has no such signaling value and
arises instead for its aesthetic value--a value determined solely by the females of a species. Presenting persuasive
supporting data while clearly articulating much about the scientific process, Prum maintains that a correct reading of
sexual selection indicates that it is a potent mechanism for females to develop sexual autonomy. By controlling various
aspects of male behavior through mate choice, Prum argues that females of many species have reduced the incidence of
rape while increasing male sociality. He also offers hypotheses for the evolution of the female orgasm and
homosexuality while embedding the concept of feminism solidly within a biological framework. Prum crosses many
boundaries while provoking readers to consider Darwin's ignored idea as a new paradigm. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--and Us."
Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973677&it=r&asid=38c3f4a81794edc44703493673317b1c.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A484973677

Cocker, Mark. "On the origin of sexual attraction." New Statesman, 23 June 2017, p. 46+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499720313&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. "Prum, Richard O.: THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485105091&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. "The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--and Us." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973677&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.

• New Scientist
  https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431243-100-we-may-have-the-evolution-of-beauty-completely-wrong/
  Word count: 1207

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  REVIEW 3 May 2017
  We may have the evolution of beauty completely wrong
  Many male animals sport dazzling displays to attract a mate. But a new book says we may have misunderstood Darwin – and this is all about arbitrary aesthetics

  bird of paradise
  It is hard work sporting exuberant plumage like this bird of paradise
  Nick Garrett/naturepl.com
  By Adrian Barnett

  “THE sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.

  In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).

  9780385537216
  But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.

  What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.

  And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests. Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.

  As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone. Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin. In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.

  “Female love of beauty has got nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution”
  Clearly Prum is, to put it mildly, bucking a trend, even if he is in good company. But his 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.

  Not all of Prum’s analogies or counterexamples worked for me, and the attacks on the prevailing view often seemed strident. However, the book deserves to be read, just as the idea of pure beauty evolving unallied to selection and unalloyed by function deserves to be examined and considered. You may not end up agreeing with the reason for its existence, but 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.

  The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world – and us
  Richard O. Prum
  Doubleday

  This article appeared in print under the headline “Useless beauty”

  More on these topics: animalsCharles Darwinevolution
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  Adrian Barnett is a rainforest ecologist at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research in ManausMagazine issue 3124, published 6 May 2017
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• The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/science/evolution-of-beauty-richard-prum-darwin-sexual-selection.html
  Word count: 2799

  HomeSKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO NAVIGATIONVIEW MOBILE VERSION The New York Times SCIENCE
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  Cover PhotoThe upright wing pose of a greater bird of paradise. Credit Tim Laman/National Geographic Creative
  Challenging Mainstream
  Thought About Beauty’s
  Big Hand in Evolution
  Are aesthetic judgments about mates invariably tied to traits we see
  as adaptive and worth passing on? Or, does beauty just ‘happen’?

  By JAMES GORMANMAY 29, 2017
  Not long ago, a physicist at Stanford posed a rhetorical question that took me by surprise.

  “Why is there so much beauty?” he asked.

  Beauty was not what I was thinking the world was full of when he brought it up. The physicist, Manu Prakash, was captivated by the patterns in seawater made as starfish larvae swam about. But he did put his finger on quite a puzzle: Why is there beauty? Why is there any beauty at all?

  Richard O. Prum, a Yale ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, offers a partial answer in a new book, “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us.” He writes about one kind of beauty — the oh-is-he/she-hot variety — and mostly as it concerns birds, not people. And his answer is, in short: That’s what female birds like.

  This won’t help with understanding the appeal of fluid dynamics or the night sky, but Dr. Prum is attempting to revive and expand on a view that Charles Darwin held, one that sounds revolutionary even now.

  Continue reading the main story
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  Continue reading the main story

  The idea is that when they are choosing mates — and in birds it’s mostly the females who choose — animals make choices that can only be called aesthetic. They perceive a kind of beauty. Dr. Prum defines it as “co-evolved attraction.” They desire that beauty, often in the form of fancy feathers, and their desires change the course of evolution.

  Continue reading the main story
  Photo

  An Indian peacock, above, displays his feathers. Credit Marcel van Kammen/Minden Pictures
  All biologists recognize that birds choose mates, but the mainstream view now is that the mate chosen is the fittest in terms of health and good genes. Any ornaments or patterns simply reflect signs of fitness. Such utility is objective. Dr. Prum’s — and Darwin’s — notion of beauty is something more subjective, with no other meaning than its aesthetic appeal.

  Dr. Prum wants to push evolutionary biologists to re-examine their assumptions about utility and beauty, objectivity and subjectivity. But he also wants to reach the public with a message that is clear whether or not you dip into the technical aspects of evolution. The yearning to pick your own mate is not something that began with humans, he says. It can be found in ducks, pheasants and other creatures.

  “Freedom of choice matters to animals,” he said recently on a birding trip to a beach near his office in New Haven. “We’ve been explaining away desire rather than actually trying to understand or explain it. That’s one of the biggest shifts that the book is about.”

  The book ranges from hard science to speculation, and he does not expect his colleagues to agree with him on all of his ideas. In fact, he gets a twinkle in his eye when he anticipates intellectual conflict.

  “I don’t know anybody who actually agrees with me,” he said with a frank smile.

  “Even my own students aren’t there yet.”

  Photo

  Richard O. Prum on a birdwatching walk in East Rock park in Connecticut. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
  To grasp his view, a little bit of history is in order. Darwin famously proposed the idea of evolution by natural selection, what is often called survival of the fittest. To put it simply, living things vary in their inherited traits, from speed to color to sense of smell. The traits of the individuals who survive longer and have the most offspring become more common. So, over time, the faster antelope have more young, the fastest of them have more offspring, and antelope end up very speedy.

  But reproduction isn’t just about surviving and staying healthy long enough to mate. You have to find a mate. And in many species, your mate must choose you. This process is sexual selection. Female birds are often the ones choosing. And their choices can produce male birds that are incredibly colorful, and some that are elaborate dancers or designers of striking boudoirs — like the bower birds. If, for example, females like males with long tails, then long-tailed males have more offspring, and the longest-tailed of those offspring reproduce more. In the end, that species becomes known for its long tails.

  Maydianee Andrade, an evolutionary biologist and vice dean at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, who studies sexual selection and teaches evolution, said that “the question is basically this. You can think of females when they are choosing a mate as foraging. So what are they looking for?”

  “If you’re dragging a giant tail behind you, that might tell the female something,” she said. “A male that survives carrying a large heavy tail is more impressive than a male that survives with a short tail.”

  But survival might not have anything to do with it. Some female finches use white feathers to line their nest, perhaps to camouflage white eggs. In one experiment, they also liked males with white feathers stuck on their heads better than other males. This seemed to be an aesthetic choice, and also proved that there is no accounting for taste.

  Continue reading the main story
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  Photo

  A male great bowerbird displaying for a female in Australia.
  Credit Matthias Breiter/Minden Pictures
  Darwin contended that selection-based mate choice was different from natural selection because the females were often making decisions based on what looked good — on beauty, as they perceived it — and not on survival or some objective quality like speed or strength. Scientists of that era reacted negatively, partly because of the emphasis on females. “Such is the instability of vicious feminine caprice that no constancy of coloration could be produced by its selective action,” wrote St. George Jackson Mivart, an English biologist who was at first a great supporter and later a critic of natural selection.

  Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin, preferred the idea that the colors and patterns meant something — either they were signs that this was a male of the right species, or they indicated underlying fitness. Perhaps only a strong, healthy male could support such a big, beautiful tail.

  At the very birth of evolutionary theory, scientists were arguing about how sexual selection worked. And they kept at it, through the discovery of genes and many other advances.

  Fast forward to the 1980s, when Dr. Prum was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, sharing an office with Geoffrey Hill, now a professor at Auburn University.

  At that time, mainstream evolutionary thought took a big swing toward the idea that ornaments and fancy feathers were indications of underlying fitness. “Animals with the best ornamentation were the best males,” Dr. Hill said. This was called “honest signaling” of underlying genetic fitness. The idea, he said, “almost completely ran over what was the old idea of beauty.”

  Continue reading the main story

  Photo

  A close-up view of the wing feathers of a great argus pheasant. Credit Paul D. Stewart/Minden Pictures
  Dr. Hill, for one, was completely convinced. “I was pretty sure I could explain all ornaments in all animals as honest signaling.” But, he added, he has since reconsidered. There are some extreme forms of ornamentation that he thinks don’t signal anything, but rather are a result of the kind of process Dr. Prum favors.

  “You can’t explain a peacock’s tail with honest signaling,” Dr. Hill said.

  But, he said, he thought Dr. Prum had taken an important idea and gotten “a little bit carried away with it.” The book, he said, “was a great read, and I could tell he put his heart and soul into it.” But, he said, he found it “scientifically disappointing.”

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  Darwin himself, Dr. Hill said, “was completely unsatisfied with his work on sexual selection.” And the mainstream of evolutionary biology is not hostile to a partial role for arbitrary female choice. Dr. Hill has recently argued for combining several different processes to explain sexual selection.

  Dr. Prum is indeed given to enthusiasm, and to intellectual contention. He has been on the winning side of initially unpopular ideas before.

  As a graduate student, he sided with researchers who wanted to change the way animals are classified, to emphasize their evolutionary descent. The new idea was called cladistics and it is now the established idea. He has done groundbreaking research on both the physical structure and the evolution of feathers, and he was an early supporter of the notion that birds descended from dinosaurs, another new idea that is now the mainstream view.

  Continue reading the main story
  Photo

  Harlequin sea duck drakes in Long Beach, N.J.
  Credit George Grall/National Geographic, via Getty Images
  In neither case was he a lone voice. But he is nothing if not confident, and not only in his science. Take the question of pizza.

  In New Haven, pizza is something akin to a religion, and there are different sects. When I asked Dr. Prum who makes the best pizza in town, thinking he would pick one of the rival pizzerias, he didn’t hesitate.

  “I do,” he said. He uses an outdoor grill with a special attachment, and he described his pursuit of the perfect pizza in some detail. When I raised an eyebrow he offered me a reference, a friend and writer who had consumed the Prum pies.

  He also acknowledged that he approaches many things with single-minded intensity.

  “I’m given to obsessions,” he said. Bird watching was the first and most long-lasting. Evolutionary biology may be the deepest. Cooking, opera, gardening and politics (left-wing) are others.

  He has disagreed with the dominant view of sexual selection since graduate school and sees his new book, which he hopes will reach beyond scientists, as a kind of manifesto. It has too many parts to summarize. He takes a chapter, for instance, to speculate that same-sex attraction in humans evolved in our ancestors through female choices that undermine male sexual coercion. For a full account, you need to read the book.

  Photo

  A painted bunting in flight. Credit Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
  But one particular aspect of his argument is his distress at the idea that almost all evolutionary change is assumed to be adaptive, contributing to fitness. In other words, if a fish is blue, it must be blue for a reason. The color must help it escape predators or sneak up on prey, or be otherwise useful in some way. Beauty, therefore, must be adaptive, or a sign of underlying qualities that are adaptive. Pick a behavior or an ornament or a physical trait, and it is useful until proven otherwise.

  That’s backward, says Dr. Prum. Take beauty. Since animals have aesthetic preferences and make choices, beauty will inevitably appear. “Beauty happens,” as he puts it, and it should be taken as nonadaptive until proven otherwise.

  In proposing this so-called “null hypothesis,” he draws on the work of Mark A. Kirkpatrick at the University of Texas, Austin, who studies population genetics, genomics and evolutionary theory and had read parts of “The Evolution of Beauty.”

  “I’m very impressed that Rick is taking on this crusade,” Dr. Kirkpatrick said. He is not convinced that all aspects of sexual selection are based on arbitrary choices for perceived beauty, but, he said, if Dr. Prum can convince some other scientists to question their assumptions, “he will do a great service.”

  For Dr. Prum, at least, there is a partial answer to the question posed by Dr. Prakash. Why are birds beautiful?

  “Birds are beautiful because they’re beautiful to themselves.”

  Correction: June 2, 2017
  An article on Tuesday about the evolution of beauty misspelled the middle name of a scientist who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Charles Darwin. He is Alfred Russel Wallace, not Russell.

  Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.

  A version of this article appears in print on May 30, 2017, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Eye for Beauty. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

  Continue reading the main story
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• The Huffington Post
  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/beauty-and-profit-the-evolution-of-beauty-2017-by_us_598ae9d8e4b030f0e267c8a2
  Word count: 1578

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  Mary (Polly) Cleveland, Contributor
  Economist
  Beauty and Profit: The Evolution of Beauty (2017) by Richard O. Prum
  08/09/2017 06:56 am ET

  In 1860 Charles Darwin wrote to his American colleague, Asa Gray: “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” What was Darwin’s problem?

  Darwin (1809 – 1882) had just published his masterpiece On the Origin of Species (1859), in which he laid out his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin had rushed The Origin into print so as not to be beaten out by his co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). Unlike Wallace, Darwin worried about many seemingly maladaptive features of living organisms – like the male peacock’s beautiful but cumbersome tail.

  In 1871, Darwin published his second big book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, Darwin argued that, besides natural selection, two sexual mechanisms were at work. Horns and other weapons as well as large body size of many males, he claimed, derived from the “Law of Battle”– the competition between males (mostly) for access to the opposite sex. He called the second mechanism “Taste for the Beautiful”. This happened when one sex, usually female, selected mates by some arbitrary aesthetic criterion – like eye spots on a peacock’s tail. Aesthetic selection could “run away”: When females selected a male for his long tail or his red cockade, they would produce male offspring with long tails or red cockades and female offspring with a taste for males with long tails or red cockades.

  In The Evolution of Beauty, Yale ornithologist Richard Prum picks up the story. The Victorians were quite content with the “Law of Battle”, but “Taste for the Beautiful” – no way! The very idea that females could exercise active sexual choice appalled that prudish society. Wallace himself led the reaction, becoming more “Darwinian” than Darwin in his insistence that natural selection could account for all features of living things. As Prum details, Wallace’s view dominates evolutionary science to this day. Natural scientists have twisted themselves into knots explaining peacocks’ tails as somehow adaptive. A popular hypothesis is that the very burden of the tail indicates to a female that a male is extra fit and healthy.

  Prum will have none of this. Of course, as he points out, there’s a trade-off between ornament and fitness. A bird with too long a tail won’t survive as well as one with only a moderately long tail. But nonetheless sexual selection can impair fitness*. He gives a telling example: the club-winged manakin. The male of this tiny neotropical bird makes a violin-like squeak by rubbing its wings together at high speed; to squeak, it has evolved distorted solid-boned wings that make it an inefficient flyer. Moreover, the female has the same wings, though hollow-boned and less extreme. (This happens because embryos start out identical and only later differentiate by sex; that’s why males have nipples.)

  Prum recognizes the parallel to economics. He reports a conversation with his Yale colleague, Robert Shiller, who complains about the “efficient market hypothesis,” so popular before the crash of 2008. The “efficient market hypothesis” assumes that in the markets for stocks, bonds, other securities, and even land, the prices reasonably reflect future profitability. The hypothesis course turned out to be disastrously wrong in the stock market bubble of the roaring 20s, and in the world wide real estate bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. But I believe the problem goes deeper.

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  Conventional neoclassical economics assumes that in a capitalist society, competition forces all businesses to relentlessly maximize profit or fail. Marxian economics makes the same assumption. That’s why conventional economists celebrate capitalism, because it supposedly leads to efficiency and innovation. That’s why Marxists condemn capitalism, because it seems to require ruthless anti-social behavior. To me, the assumption that “cutthroat competition” alone shapes the economic world is equivalent to the “Darwinian” assumption that “survival of the fittest” alone shapes the natural world.

  How might Darwin’s two alternative mechanisms show up in the economic world? The “Law of Battle” evokes vast advertising campaigns, often misleading, wasteful and ineffective. Or legal battles over patents and copyrights. But, like the giant horns on a bull elk, blowing money on such activities could signal corporate “fitness.” What about a “Taste for the Beautiful”? That evokes monumental, luxurious corporate headquarters, private planes, eye-popping salaries and other perks for corporate management. Do such features aid or hinder corporate profitability? The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times overflow with accounts of executives pursuing their self-interest at the expense of the bottom line—even when the value of their stock is falling. Corporations are of course a modern invention; a few generations ago, when businesses were mostly run by families, it would have been laughable to deem the “conspicuous consumption” of wealthy owners as profit-maximizing behavior.

  The same fallacy underlies both the theory of “survival of the fittest” and the theory of “cutthroat competition”. That’s the assumption that living species and economic organizations eternally teeter on the razor edge of survival. Put like that, it’s obviously nonsense. In the natural world, saying that a species occupies an ecological “niche” suggests there’s a particular location in which it has enough of an advantage to thrive in good times and survive in bad ones. That location might be a zebra’s gut for botfly larvae or New York City for Norway rats. Businesses have niches too: spots where they enjoy a little—or a lot—of monopoly power. Sr. Perez’s corner bodega enjoys a bit of monopoly power by being the most convenient shopping location at the most convenient hours in the immediate neighborhood. At the other end of the scale, there’s Exxon-Mobil. Monopoly can provide Sr. Perez a small cushion when bad weather keeps customers indoors; international monopoly provides a tempting slush fund for Exxon execs.

  Prum reminds us we need to challenge rigid doctrines and follow Darwin’s open-minded investigation of the natural or economic world around us. (Of course, if the central problem of capitalism is monopoly instead of cutthroat competition, we must look for alternative solutions.)

  * By “fitness”, Darwin meant adaptation to the environment, or ability to survive—an objective characteristic. Modern evolutionary scientists, to Prum’s infinite annoyance, have redefined “fitness” as relative success in passing on one’s genes. This circular definition—success as its own measure—makes Darwin’s ideas of sexual selection meaningless.

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• Forbes
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2017/05/07/how-sexual-selection-drove-the-emergence-of-homosexuality/#30873c3f5f84
  Word count: 2086

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  MAY 7, 2017 @ 08:52 AM 3,445 2 Free Issues of Forbes
  How Sexual Selection Drove The Emergence Of Homosexuality

  John Farrell , CONTRIBUTOR
  I cover science and technology.
  Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
  It can be a sore point for evolutionary biologists who study sexual selection. In the popular coverage of evolution, mate choice too often gets overlooked, in the shadow of natural selection. Yale biologist Richard O. Prum's new book responds to this imbalance.

  Dr. Richard O. Prum, Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University.MacArthur Foundation
  Dr. Richard O. Prum, Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University.
  Prum is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale. Over the years he has conducted detailed field studies of multiple bird species and their mating habits all around the world. This has given him a broad perspective on sexual selection.

  And in his book, due out this week, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us, Prum outlines his own theory of what he calls aesthetic evolution, driven by male and (mostly) female preferences. In tackling the question surrounding a much broader range of species--including our own, Prum offers some provocative and convincing hypotheses on how and why homosexuality evolved. (I imagine, too, that this has started some lively arguments amongst his colleagues who focus exclusively on primates and humans.)

  So, at the risk of disappointing readers more interested in birds and ducks, I'm going to focus on his discussion of Homo sapiens.

  Sexual diversity poses distinct challenges to evolutionary explanation, according to Prum. How can evolution explain sexual behavior that is not directly related to reproduction?

  "One of the most exciting aspects of my emerging theory of aesthetic evolution is the possibility that it sheds light on this enduring mystery of variation in human sexual desire."

  First and foremost, he points out, this requires setting aside conceptual categories of sexual identity. Categories like heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, etc. "The idea that sexual behavior is a marker or definition of a person's identity is actually a quite modern, cultural invention--perhaps only 150 years old. Because we live in a society that is accustomed to conceiving of sexual behavior in terms of sexual identity, we tend to think that sexual identity categories are biologically real and, therefore, require scientific explanation."

  Comment on this story Page 1 / 4 Continue
  John Farrell , CONTRIBUTOR
  I cover science and technology.
  Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
  It can be a sore point for evolutionary biologists who study sexual selection. In the popular coverage of evolution, mate choice too often gets overlooked, in the shadow of natural selection. Yale biologist Richard O. Prum's new book responds to this imbalance.

  Dr. Richard O. Prum, Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University.MacArthur Foundation
  Dr. Richard O. Prum, Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University.
  Prum is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale. Over the years he has conducted detailed field studies of multiple bird species and their mating habits all around the world. This has given him a broad perspective on sexual selection.

  And in his book, due out this week, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us, Prum outlines his own theory of what he calls aesthetic evolution, driven by male and (mostly) female preferences. In tackling the question surrounding a much broader range of species--including our own, Prum offers some provocative and convincing hypotheses on how and why homosexuality evolved. (I imagine, too, that this has started some lively arguments amongst his colleagues who focus exclusively on primates and humans.)

  So, at the risk of disappointing readers more interested in birds and ducks, I'm going to focus on his discussion of Homo sapiens.

  Sexual diversity poses distinct challenges to evolutionary explanation, according to Prum. How can evolution explain sexual behavior that is not directly related to reproduction?

  "One of the most exciting aspects of my emerging theory of aesthetic evolution is the possibility that it sheds light on this enduring mystery of variation in human sexual desire."

  First and foremost, he points out, this requires setting aside conceptual categories of sexual identity. Categories like heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, etc. "The idea that sexual behavior is a marker or definition of a person's identity is actually a quite modern, cultural invention--perhaps only 150 years old. Because we live in a society that is accustomed to conceiving of sexual behavior in terms of sexual identity, we tend to think that sexual identity categories are biologically real and, therefore, require scientific explanation."

  Prum pushes back against this tendency and notes its prevalence even in the scientific field. "Sure enough, an ample scientific literature on 'the evolution of homosexuality' gets this issue mostly wrong and has undermined itself as a result."
  The problem with 'the evolution of homosexuality', he writes, is that it starts with the assumption that there is an evolutionary conundrum to be solved in the first place. But before the concepts of sexual identity emerged, it was not at all clear, Prum argues, that same-sex preferences were associated with lowered reproductive success.Doubleday
  "Humans have evolved to engage in sex more frequently, for greater duration, with greater pleasure, and in a greater variety of ways than did our ape ancestors," he writes, "and many of the resulting sexual behaviors do not contribute to reproduction directly, yet they are perfectly consistent with reproductive success."
  Prum proposes that human same sex-behavior might have evolved through female mate choice as a mechanism to advance female sexual autonomy and to reduce sexual conflict over fertilization and parental care. According to his aesthetic hypothesis, he writes, the existence of same-sex behavior in humans is another evolutionary response to the persistent primate problem of male sexual coercion, a trait that is widespread in other species.
  "Although I think that all human same-sex behavior might have evolved to provide females with greater autonomy and freedom of sexual choice, I address the evolution of female same-sex behavior and male same-sex behavior separately because I believe that their evolutionary mechanisms differ substantially in detail."

  The social and sexual behavior of primates is greatly influenced by which sex leaves the social group into which it is born when it reaches the age of sexual maturity. The movement of young adults out of one social group into another is necessary to prevent genetic inbreeding, he points out.
  With most primate species, it is the male that moves out in search of a female from another group, while the females stay at home.
  But African apes and a few of the old world monkey species evolved the opposite pattern--female dispersal among social groups, Prum notes. And this is the ancestral condition for humans. A consequence is that all primate females within such female-dispersal based societies begin their sexual lives at a disadvantage, writes Prum, "because of the lack of social support of developed social networks to help them resist male sexual coercion and social intimidation."
  As a result, females needed to organize a natural defense by selecting mates and friends most willing to protect their autonomy.
  Even when females stay in their natal social groups, Prum points out, they must create protective social networks, and primatologists have noted that even male friends in primates (like baboons) help protect females' offspring from males who would otherwise kill them. Female-female friendships contribute to protection of each other's offspring against infanticide and other threats, he writes.
  Based on this mutually supportive network, Prum believes that female same-sex behavior in humans evolved as a way to construct and strengthen new female-female social alliances "and make up for the ones that were lost when the females left their original, natal social groups."
  In a similar way, he argues, male same-sex behavior in humans might also have evolved to advance female sexual autonomy, but by a different mechanism.
  In aesthetic evolution, Prum's proposed hypothesis, female mate choice has acted over time not only on the selection of preferred male physical features, but also on male social traits, "in such a way as to remodel male behavior and, secondarily, to transform male-male social relationships."
  "In other words," he writes, "selection for the aesthetic, pro-social personality features that females preferred in their mates also contributed, incidentally, to the evolution of broader male sexual desires, including male same-sex preferences and behavior."
  So, once male same-sex behavior emerged within a population, according to Prum's hypothesis, it would advance female sexual autonomy in a number of ways. "I suggest first that even if relatively few males within a social group had same-sex attractions, this could result in substantial changes in the social environment."
  As some males evolved same-sex sexual preferences, the increased breadth of male sexual outlets could lessen the intensity of male interest, and investment, in sexual and social control over females and diminish the ferocity of male-male sexual competition. Because male sexual competitors might also be sexual partners, this could further minimize their competitiveness with each other without necessarily producing any loss in their reproductive success.
  In fact, Prum adds, he is proposing that the evolutionary changes in male sexual preferences occurred specifically because males with traits that are associated with same-sex preferences were preferred as mates by females.
  The upshot of this is that in a sense all of these desired traits passed into the male population, regardless of whether the individual turns out to be heterosexual or homosexual in practice.
  The aesthetic theory of the evolution of male same-sex behavior does not imply that men with a predominantly same-sex orientation have any physical or social personality traits that differ from those of other males. Exactly the contrary, in fact. The hypothesis maintains that there is nothing distinctive about such men, because the features that evolved along with same-sex preferences have become a typical component of human maleness in general. Therefore, individuals with exclusively same-sex sexual preferences are distinctive only in the exclusivity, not in the existence, of their same-sex desires.
  It will be interesting to see how Prum's hypothesis fares amongst his colleagues who specialize in primatology and the other disciplines.
  I highly recommend The Evolution of Beauty.

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