
The Evolution of Beauty
How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us
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Narrated by:
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Dan Woren
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By:
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Richard O. Prum
About this listen
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 3-D spheres, red-capped manakins who moonwalk. In 30 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 ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time.
The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.
©2017 Richard O. Prum (P)2017 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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On July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace was shot and killed on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. But months before Versace’s murder, award-winning journalist Maureen Orth was already investigating a major story on Cunanan for Vanity Fair. Culled from interviews with more than four hundred people and insights gleaned from thousands of pages of police reports, Vulgar Favors tells the complete story of Andrew Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed world in which they lived . . . and died.
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ONE OF THE BEST TRUE CRIME BOOKS IN MY LIBRARY!
- By Steve on 10-29-17
By: Maureen Orth
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Water
- A Biography
- By: Giulio Boccaletti
- Narrated by: Giulio Boccaletti
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boccaletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.
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Understand Built-Environment Governance~Know Water
- By Tom on 05-11-22
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Our Tribal Future
- How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good
- By: David R. Samson
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Tribalism is one of the most complex and ancient evolutionary forces; it gave us the capacity for cooperation and competition, and allowed us to navigate increasingly complex social landscapes. It is so powerful that it can predict our behavior even better than race, class, gender, or religion. But in our vast modern world, has this blessing become a curse? Our Tribal Future explores a central paradox of our species: how altruism, community, kindness, and genocide are all driven by the same core adaptation.
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Best Game Plan Yet for Unfucking the World
- By Rob R. on 07-26-23
By: David R. Samson
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The Deep History of Ourselves
- The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
- By: Joseph LeDoux
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This pause-resisting survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.
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Oversold
- By Michael on 03-04-20
By: Joseph LeDoux
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Believer
- My Forty Years in Politics
- By: David Axelrod
- Narrated by: David Axelrod
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The man behind some of the greatest political changes of the last decade, David Axelrod has devoted a lifetime to questioning political certainties and daring to bring fresh thinking into the political landscape. Whether as a child hearing John F. Kennedy stump in New York or as a strategist guiding the first African American to the White House, Axelrod shows in Believer how his own life stands at the center of the tumultuous American century.
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Love letter to Obama
- By DaWoolf on 03-15-15
By: David Axelrod
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Speed & Scale
- An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now
- By: John Doerr, Ryan Panchadsaram
- Narrated by: John Doerr, Sundar Pichai, Margot Brown, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2006, John Doerr was moved by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and a challenge from his teenage daughter: “Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it.” Since then, Doerr has searched for solutions to this existential problem - as an investor, an advocate, and a philanthropist. Fifteen years later, despite breakthroughs in batteries, electric vehicles, plant-based proteins, and solar and wind power, global warming continues to get worse. Its impact is all around us: droughts, floods, wildfires, the melting of the polar ice caps.
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Most Important and Worst Audiobook ever!
- By Amazon Customer on 12-17-21
By: John Doerr, and others
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The Art of More
- How Mathematics Created Civilization
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: Nick Afka Thomas
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this captivating, sweeping history, Michael Brooks makes clear that mathematics was one of the foundational innovations that catapulted humanity from a nomadic existence to civilization, and that it has been instrumental in every subsequent great leap of humankind: from charting the movements of celestial bodies to navigating the globe to tracking the dissemination of viruses.
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Wow!
- By Cinski446 on 07-12-22
By: Michael Brooks
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Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
- Essays
- By: Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit - introduction
- Narrated by: James Naughton, Rebecca Solnit
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it—a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he’d long warned.
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Intense and beautifully personal
- By Karen West on 06-28-23
By: Barry Lopez, and others
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The Reopening of the Western Mind
- The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment
- By: Charles Freeman
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 27 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The Closing of the Western Mind (“A triumph”—The Times), explores the rebirth of Western thought in the centuries that followed the demise of the classical era. As the dominance of Christian teachings gradually subsided over time, a new open-mindedness made way for the ideas of morality and theology, and fueled and formed the backbone of the Western mind of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
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Fascinating survey of 1,000+ years of thought
- By Roger on 11-07-23
By: Charles Freeman
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Nobody's Normal
- How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness
- By: Roy Richard Grinker
- Narrated by: Lyle Blaker
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma - from the 18th century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.
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Educational Trudge
- By MFreddy25 on 08-31-21
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Life on Other Planets
- A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe
- By: Aomawa Shields PhD
- Narrated by: Aomawa Shields PhD
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As a kid, Aomawa Shields was always bumping into things, her neck craned up at the sky, dreaming of becoming an astronaut. A year into an astrophysics PhD program, plagued by self-doubt and discouraged by a white male professor who suggested that she—a young Black woman who also loved fashion, makeup, and the arts—didn’t belong, she left astronomy and pursued acting professionally for a decade, before a day job working for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope drew her back to the stars.
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I’m in love with this book!
- By Evelyn on 07-21-23
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Consilience
- The Unity of Knowledge
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.
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A Singular Achievement!
- By The Saint on 02-25-19
By: Edward O. Wilson
Explains a lot about evolution I wondered about
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A quick technical note. The narrator was great. I kind of wish they added actual bird calls. The narrator did an admirable job mimicking them. It makes sense in an audiobook that they could play actual recordings.
Regarding the content.
All in all, I agree with the author. I think Evolutionists can often overlook anything other than Natural Selection as a force for evolution. And I think that his theory of aesthetic selection is reasonable. Of course, most evolutionary biologists would agree, but they do tend to minimize.
That being said, I absolutely don't think the aesthetic selection should be the null hypothesis, which he argues for, and I don't like when he turns to conspiracies and cultural biases as to why it isn't more widely accepted.
Still a good book that is worth listening to.
Interesting ideas. A little oversold.
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Sexual Selection in an Old Light
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Profound, and surprisingly feminist!
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This book has something to teach us all!
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Good ornithology, speculative and political anthropology
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Creative view of evolution.
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Evolution update
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The basis for the next Paradigm shift
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In fact, Darwin had two major theories, one of which has been subsumed because it does not fit the “modern” construct of dominant males and passive females that undergirds so much of our cultural experience in America and worldwide. Professor Prum’s radical approach to include both of Darwin’s major theories as an explanation for evolution including the sexual autonomy of both sexes in sexual selection as influenced by an expansive definition of beauty is compelling. The set up is in the whole first section of the book as explained through adaptation by one of the most ancient species on earth - birds. I’m not a birder, but I was riveted all through the section. The second portion of the book applies scientist’s (ornithologist ‘s) research to the contemporary human experience as regards sexual choice of women, men and the full spectrum of the LGBT communities and the relationship of beauty and art in this process - a central postulate of Darwin’s original work. Fascinating and profound.
Making Sense of Art and Sex
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