In this thorough, comprehensive study, she considers such broad themes as race, sexual politics, marriage, class, adaptation, fashion, competition, beauty, and religion. Richards explains how and why Darwin invoked this concept, including a chronological history of its development. “This work investigates ‘the intellectual and social roots of Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection’ by examining his notes and published writings, particularly The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Read More about Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection Read Less about Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection A true milestone in the history of science, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection illuminates the social and cultural contingencies of the shaping of an important-if controversial-biological concept that is back in play in current evolutionary theory. Richards deftly explores the narrative strands of this history and vividly brings to life the chief characters involved. Her fine-grained analysis comprehends the extraordinarily wide range of Darwin’s sources and disentangles the complexity of theory, practice, and analogy that went into the making of sexual selection. Drawing on the minutiae of his unpublished notes, annotations in his personal library, and his extensive correspondence, Evelleen Richards offers a richly detailed, multilayered history. Only now, with Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, do we have a comprehensive and meticulously researched account of Darwin’s path to its formulation-one that shows the man, rather than the myth, and examines both the social and intellectual roots of Darwin’s theory. Yet sexual selection was of great strategic importance to Darwin because it explained things that natural selection could not and offered a naturalistic, as opposed to divine, account of beauty and its perception. Darwin’s concept of natural selection has been exhaustively studied, but his secondary evolutionary principle of sexual selection remains largely unexplored and misunderstood.
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