 The evolutionary zoologist Mark Ridley, reviewing "The Ant and the Peacock" in the "New York Times", writes that it is a "fine book" in which Cronin uses our modern understanding of altruism (the ant) and "dangerously gaudy sexual ornamentation" (the peacock).Ridley notes that there are two reasons for sex differences like the peacock's train, and that Cronin explains them through the debate of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.Darwin proposed female choice