First, let's talk about the word beauty. Colloquially, beauty means a subjective human experience that can be felt about anything. But in the context of sexual selection, beauty means whatever features or behaviors an animal uses to attract a mate.
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Someone pointed me to this intriguing comment from
@jeffvandermeer Well, biologists aren't exactly telling animals how to choose their mates. Sometimes what an animal finds attractive is ugly or uninteresting to us! For ex: the whiny calls of the túngara frogs I discussed.pic.twitter.com/e4sY3t4vwt
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Part of the challenge here is to adopt the perspective of other animal minds. It's about recognizing that they likely have *their own* subjective aesthetic preferences, not superimposing our own tastes onto them.
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The related question of why *we* find so much beauty in other species is fascinating. I tried to address this in the conclusion by thinking about flowers. Flowers did not evolve for us! They evolved to be attractive to pollinators. So why are we so obsessed with them?
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Some commenters insist that sexual selection is a type of natural selection. This has been a dominant view for decades; you'll find it in textbooks. But this is *not* the consensus among sexual selection experts. Many of them see it as a distinct process w/ diff rules & outcomespic.twitter.com/5WkYbGLOY4
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Sexual selection is, however, a form of evolution. Some people have read the headline as denying or upending evolution. That's not the message here. Studying the origins of beauty has genuinely changed how scientists think *about* evolution, not made them question its validity.
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A few people have objected to the idea that sexual selection has been neglected in biology. To clarify, the point is that Darwin's original framework, with its emphasis on arbitrary beauty & animal sentience, has taken a very long time to be accepted & is still controversial.
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Many of the scientists I spoke to agreed that historically the "good genes" hypothesis and other utilitarian concepts have been overemphasized, crowding out other equally valid explanations.
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Finally, I've repeatedly seen assertions that evolution is entirely about reproductive success. This is a misunderstanding. It's important & useful to distinguish between survival pressures & reproductive pressures, to recognize how they both compete & conspire.pic.twitter.com/1kCvj67AAp
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I think part of what makes beauty so compelling is the way it simultaneously mesmerizes and eludes us. I wanted to convey the challenge and excitement of trying to scientifically study beauty—and an awe for everything we cannot explain.pic.twitter.com/48c4N3rlYT
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You might enjoy this essay on the topic by @KevinSimler https://meltingasphalt.com/a-natural-history-of-beauty/ …
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