title: The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us
author:  Richard O. Prum 
description: "Prum'sargument is exhilarating . . .<i>The Evolution of Beauty</i> should be widely read, as it will provoke readers, shaking them (as reading Hume did to Kant) from their dogmatic slumbers . . . I dont see how any biologist could read this book and not walk away at least questioning the idea that adaptation must explain every last trait. Survival of the fittest might not be enough to explain nature. We might need survival of the prettiest, too."<br /><b>Sam Kean, <i>Wall Street Journal</i></b><br /><br />"Prum draws on decades of study, hundreds of papers, and a lively, literate, and mischievous mind . . .a delicious read, both seductive and mutinous . . . Prum's attention never strays far from nature, and his writing [about birds] is minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual."<br /><b>David Dobbs, <i>New York Times Book Review</i></b><br /><br />"The single most provocative book I read this year, one of those books that changes the way you look at everything . . . Everything about this book is unexpected, including the prosefine and often funny."<br /><b>Michael Pollan</b><br /><br /><i>The Evolution of Beauty</i> is at once fascinating, provocative, and totally compelling. Anyone interested in science or art or sexwhich is to say everyonewill want to read it.<br /> <b>Elizabeth Kolbert, author of <i>The Sixth Extinction</i></b><br /> <br /> A fascinating account of beauty and mate choice in birds and other animals. Youll be amazed by the weird things that birds do to win mates.Youll also discover why both men and women have armpit hair, why men lack the penis bone widespread in other mammals, and what really happened in the Garden of Eden.<br /> <b>Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>Guns, Germs, and Steel</i> <br /><br /></b>"Amajor intellectual achievement that should hasten the adoption of a more expansive style of evolutionary explanation that Darwin himself would have appreciated."<br /><b>Nick Romeo, <i>Washington Post</i></b><br /> <br /> A smorgasbord of evolutionary biology, philosophy, and sociology, filtered through Prums experiences as a birdwatcher and his diverse research on everything from dinosaur colors to duck sex. Through compelling arguments and colorful examples, Prum launches a counterstrike against the adaptationist regime, in an attempt to put the subjective experience of animals back in the center of biology and to bring beauty back to the sciences.<br /><b> Ed Yong, <i>The Atlantic</i></b><br /> <br /> Prums 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 ducks penis. Combining this with in-depth study of how science selects the ideas it approves of and fine writing about fieldwork results in a rich, absorbing text . . . 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.<br /><b> Adrian Barnett,<i> New Scientist</i></b><br /><br />"Reads like a memoir, argues like a manifesto, and shines with Prum's passion for all things ornithological."<br /><b>Erika Lorraine Milam,<i>Science</i></b><br /><br />Life isnt just a dreary slog of survival. It brims with exuberancefrom extravagant plumage to strange courtship rituals. In<i>The Evolution of Beauty,</i>Richard Prum takes us<b></b>into this universe of delights to discover a fascinating idea: that beauty is central to the history of life.<br /><b>Carl Zimmer, author of<i>Parasite Rex</i>and<i>Evolution: Making Sense of Life</i></b>
zlib_text: Sex at Dawn
  How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern
  Relationships
  Christopher Ryan, PhD, and Cacilda Jethá, MD
  
  Epigraph
  Your children are not your children.
   
  They are the sons and daughters
   
  of life’s longing for itself.
  KAHLIL GIBRAN
  
  Contents
  Epigraph
  Preface: A Primate Meets His Match (A note from one of the authors)
  Introduction: Another Well-Intentioned Inquisition
  A Few Million Years in a Few Pages
  Part I: On the Origin of the Specious
  1. Remember the Yucatán!
  You Are What You Eat
  2. What Darwin Didn’t Know About Sex
  The Flintstonization of Prehistory
  What Is Evolutionary Psychology and Why Should You Care?
  Lewis Henry Morgan
  3. A Closer Look at the Standard Narrative of Human Sexual Evolution
  How Darwin Insults Your Mother (The Dismal Science of Sexual
  Economics)
  The Famously Flaccid Female Libido
  Male Parental Investment (MPI)
  “Mixed Strategies” in the War Between the Sexes
  Extended Sexual Receptivity and Concealed Ovulation
  4. The Ape in the Mirror
  Primates 