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Useless beauty
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Useless beauty Do we need to revisit one of Darwin’s big ideas, asks Adrian Barnett
“THE sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality. In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time). But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits. What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book It is hard work sporting exuberant plumage like this bird of paradise 44 | NewScientist | 6 May 2017
The Descent of Man, and Selection collapsed convinced him that in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists much of the selection is linked to say, having set out his adaptationist nothing except a female love of stall in On the Origin of Species, beauty itself, that the only force Darwin proposed female choice pushing things forward is female as the driving force behind much appreciation. This, he says, has of the animal world’s visual nothing to do with functionality: exuberance. it is pure aesthetic evolution, with And then along comes Richard “the potential to evolve arbitrary Prum to tell you there’s more to it and useless beauty”. than that. Prum is an ornithology As Prum recounts, this idea has professor at Yale University and not found the greatest favour in a world authority on manakins, academic circles. But, as he makes a group of sparrow-sized birds plain, he’s not alone. Once again, whose dazzling males perform it seems Darwin got there first, mate-attracting gymnastics on “Female love of beauty branches in the understories of has got nothing to do with Central and South American functionality: it is pure forests. Years of watching the aesthetic evolution” males carry on until they nearly
Nick Garrett/naturepl.com
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world – and us by Richard O. Prum, Doubleday
writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin. In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”. Clearly Prum is, to put it mildly, bucking a trend, even if he is in good company. But his career has been diverse and full, so that reading this fascinating book, we learn about the patterning of dinosaur feathers, consider the evolutionary basis of the human female orgasm, the tyranny of academic patriarchy, and the corkscrewed enormity of a duck’s penis. Combining this with indepth study of how science selects the ideas it approves of and fine writing about fieldwork results in a rich, absorbing text. Not all of Prum’s analogies or counterexamples worked for me, and the attacks on the prevailing view often seemed strident. However, the book deserves to be read, just as the idea of pure beauty evolving unallied to selection and unalloyed by function deserves to be examined and considered. You may not end up agreeing with the reason for its existence, but the dance Prum performs to convince you to take him on as an intellectual partner is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms. n Adrian Barnett is a rainforest ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus
Useless beauty Do we need to revisit one of Darwin’s big ideas, asks Adrian Barnett
“THE sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality. In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time). But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits. What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book It is hard work sporting exuberant plumage like this bird of paradise 44 | NewScientist | 6 May 2017
The Descent of Man, and Selection collapsed convinced him that in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists much of the selection is linked to say, having set out his adaptationist nothing except a female love of stall in On the Origin of Species, beauty itself, that the only force Darwin proposed female choice pushing things forward is female as the driving force behind much appreciation. This, he says, has of the animal world’s visual nothing to do with functionality: exuberance. it is pure aesthetic evolution, with And then along comes Richard “the potential to evolve arbitrary Prum to tell you there’s more to it and useless beauty”. than that. Prum is an ornithology As Prum recounts, this idea has professor at Yale University and not found the greatest favour in a world authority on manakins, academic circles. But, as he makes a group of sparrow-sized birds plain, he’s not alone. Once again, whose dazzling males perform it seems Darwin got there first, mate-attracting gymnastics on “Female love of beauty branches in the understories of has got nothing to do with Central and South American functionality: it is pure forests. Years of watching the aesthetic evolution” males carry on until they nearly
Nick Garrett/naturepl.com
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world – and us by Richard O. Prum, Doubleday
writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin. In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”. Clearly Prum is, to put it mildly, bucking a trend, even if he is in good company. But his career has been diverse and full, so that reading this fascinating book, we learn about the patterning of dinosaur feathers, consider the evolutionary basis of the human female orgasm, the tyranny of academic patriarchy, and the corkscrewed enormity of a duck’s penis. Combining this with indepth study of how science selects the ideas it approves of and fine writing about fieldwork results in a rich, absorbing text. Not all of Prum’s analogies or counterexamples worked for me, and the attacks on the prevailing view often seemed strident. However, the book deserves to be read, just as the idea of pure beauty evolving unallied to selection and unalloyed by function deserves to be examined and considered. You may not end up agreeing with the reason for its existence, but the dance Prum performs to convince you to take him on as an intellectual partner is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms. n Adrian Barnett is a rainforest ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus