The Evolution of Beauty - Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us de Richard O. Prum

Date de parution : 03.2018
Format : Broché
Nombre de pages : 448
Résumé : 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 ornament...