Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival - Matt Ridley - #923

What was Darwin's strangest idea? Yeah. Sexual selection by mate choice is the idea that Darwin had uh alongside natural selection and which he maintained was a very different Process. Almost nobody agreed with him in his lifetime. It was a failure in the sense that

uh you know, he couldn't persuade people uh that this was an important thing. And when people did agree with him, they thought, Well, yeah, but it's just a small niche thing in the corner of biology. And I don't think that's right. I think he was onto something that actually when mates are selective, which they are in many species, it drives a huge amount of evolution in the other sex and it's a very different process from natural selection. I call it the fun version of evolution because it produces Like songs and things like that. It's less utilitarian. Hm. Yeah. Uh what was the reaction when

Darwin first proposed sexual selection. Well he's not a Mentioned the idea in The Origin of Species very briefly. And He said I think that uh he he had a friend called Sir John Seabright who'd been breeding rather beautiful bantam.

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