The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us

Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.

In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.

Sexual autonomy is evolution engine of beauty.

Indeed, contemporary adaptationists should question why they feel it is necessary to explain all of nature with a single powerful theory or process. Is the desire for scientific unification simply the ghost of monotheism lurking within contemporary scientific explanation? This is another implication of Darwin’s really dangerous idea.

Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was another revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices. Whenever the opportunity evolves to enact sexual preferences through mate choice, a new and distinctively aesthetic evolutionary phenomenon occurs.

Females are frightened by aggressive male displays they actually prefer.

So, just as my wife feared, discussion of the kinky qualities of duck sex came to dominate the conversation that evening. Duck sex can be elaborately aesthetic or shockingly violent and deeply troubling, but it is a fascinating topic.

Adaptive mate choice proposes that sexual desire always remains under strict control of the ultimately rational need for extrinsically better mates. In a curious anthropomorphic inversion of nature, animal passions are now seen as being more rational than our own.