A review by dellaposta
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - And Us by Richard O. Prum

5.0

Definitely a new favorite for me in the realm of science books. Prum’s basic argument is that sexual selection and aesthetic mate choice have driven evolution in directions that cannot be explained merely in terms of adaptive fitness and natural selection. Surprisingly, Prum points out, this argument originally comes from Darwin himself - before his intellectual legacy was flattened by subsequent scholars who demanded a single-minded focus on one single mechanism of evolutionary adaptation. Prum’s background is the study of birds, but he provides a surprisingly wide-ranging (and very often provocative) survey of both the human and nonhuman animal worlds in support of his theory. I’m not a biologist, so I cannot really adjudicate the evidence for some aspects of his argument. But Prum is a great writer and his book is a lot of fun to think with even if you disagree with it. He also follows his theory determinedly to all of its logical implications, and a book that begins as being about sexual ornamentation in birds ends up as a kind of general feminist manifesto. One of my favorite nonfiction books of recent years.