![]() ![]() “I think for Darwin, sexual selection was what connected humans with non-human animals,” says Ian Hesketh, a historian of science at the University of Queensland in Australia. Both mechanisms helped to explain how species evolved over time. For Darwin, sexual selection was just as important as natural selection, which he had outlined in Origin -the idea that organisms with favorable traits are more likely to reproduce, thus passing on those traits to their offspring. The male-combat theory would explain, for example, the development of a bull’s horns, or a moose’s antlers, while the quintessential example of “female choice” is seen in peahens, which, Darwin argued, prefer to mate with peacocks having the biggest, most colorful tails. In Descent, Darwin details a theory that he calls “sexual selection”-the idea that, in many species, males battle other males for access to females, while in other species females choose the biggest or most attractive males to bond with. “Man,” he wrote, “still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published 150 years ago this month, Darwin argued forcefully that all creatures were subject to the same natural laws, and that humans had evolved over countless eons, just as other animals had. A dozen years later, in 1871, he tackled that subject head-on. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species rattled Victorian readers in 1859, even though it said almost nothing about how the idea of evolution applied to human beings. ![]()
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