Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
What can explain the incredible diversity of beauty in nature? Richard O. Prum, an award-winning ornithologist, discusses Charles Darwin's second and long-neglected theory--aesthetic mate choice--and what it means for our understanding of evolution. In addition, Prum connects those same evolutionary dynamics to the origins and diversity of human sexuality, offering riveting new thinking about the evolution of human beauty and the role of mate choice,...
Author
Publisher
Pegasus Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"Bondar examines the sex lives of our animal cousins, which are fiendishly difficult, infinitely varied, and often violent. They involve razor sharp penises, murderous cannibals, and chemical warfare in an epic battle between the sexes. Like us, animals must first find the perfect partner. You think we have it tough? Try having to do it while being hunted down by predators, against a backdrop of unpredictable or life-threatening conditions. Then,...
Author
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Pub. Date
2000.
Language
English
Description
"Tim Birkhead reveals a wonderful world in which males and females vie with each other as they strive to maximize their reproductive success. Both sexes have evolved staggeringly sophisticated ways to get what they want - often at the expense of the other. He introduces us to fish whose first encounter locks them together for life in a perpetual sexual embrace; hermaphrodites who "joust" with their reproductive organs, each trying to inseminate the...
Author
Publisher
Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
Pub. Date
1991.
Language
English
Description
Cronin named her book after two organisms that gave Charles Darwin some difficult moments as he struggled with his theory of natural selection. The vast majority of ants are sterile workers, never reproducing, each always ready to engage in potential sacrifice of self for colony. How can natural selection, a theory based on self-preservation, explain the curious altruism of the ant? The peacock carries with it an immense and gaudy tail, far more than...
8) A most interesting problem: what Darwin's Descent of man got right and wrong about human evolution
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
"In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for biological evolution in his most famous work, On the Origin of Species. However, Origin makes little mention of humans. Despite this, Darwin thought deeply about humans and in 1871 published The Descent of Man, his influential and controversial book in which he applied evolutionary theory to humans and detailed his theory of sexual selection. February 2021 will mark the 150th anniversay of it's publication....
