Aesthetic Evolution In The Animal World
At the heart of Richard O. Prum's new book The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us is a bold 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."
Actually, this is Charles Darwin's idea — his other idea. It's an idea so revolutionary that, unlike natural selection itself, it has been systematically misunderstood, or outright repressed, since Darwin first developed it in his other book The Descent of Man — first published in 1871, 12 years after The Origin of Species.
What's so dangerous about what Prum calls "aesthetic evolution by mate choice?" Precisely the idea that it acknowledges, supposedly, real agency in the nonhuman world — and that it is an agency that doesn't bottom out in facts about
