The Evolution of Beauty

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,

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.

"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