Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection
Evelleen Richards
Abstract
This book offers the first comprehensive history of the formulation of Darwin’s principle of sexual selection. It locates Darwin's sources and conceptual pathways in their social and cultural contexts, and disentangles the complexity of theory, practice and analogy that went into the making of sexual selection. It is argued that from an early stage of theory building, Darwin followed a particular guiding strand: his conviction that the different human races had different in-born, heritable standards of beauty or aesthetic taste, the foundation of his theory of the role of aesthetic preference ... More
This book offers the first comprehensive history of the formulation of Darwin’s principle of sexual selection. It locates Darwin's sources and conceptual pathways in their social and cultural contexts, and disentangles the complexity of theory, practice and analogy that went into the making of sexual selection. It is argued that from an early stage of theory building, Darwin followed a particular guiding strand: his conviction that the different human races had different in-born, heritable standards of beauty or aesthetic taste, the foundation of his theory of the role of aesthetic preference in race formation, a theory that Darwin extended to the whole animal kingdom and reconstituted through the practices of animal breeders and by analogy with the fashion choices of Victorian women. The book details Darwin’s conceptualisation of this aesthetic, the basis of his concept of “female choice”, as naturalistic, sexualized, strongly gendered and race and class specific. It traces its connections with other themes and intellectual concepts, its negotiation and reshaping under social, institutional and peer pressures (notably Darwin’s prolonged conflict with Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of natural selection) onto the full-blown elaboration of sexual selection in the Descent of Man. Finally, the response to the Descent is explored through Darwin’s late Victorian readership, not simply his scientific readers, but the wider reading public who variously adopted, adapted, or rejected his theory of sexual selection.
Keywords:
sexual selection,
Charles Darwin,
history,
sources,
conceptual pathways,
contexts,
gender,
race,
Alfred Russel Wallace,
The Descent of Man
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226436906 |
| Published to University Press Scholarship Online: September 2017 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226437064.001.0001 |
