Darwin Charles - Current perspectives on sexual selection : whats left after Darwin?
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This root-and-branch reevaluation of Darwins concept of sexual selection tackles the subject from historical, epistemological and theoretical perspectives. Contributions from a wealth of disciplines have been marshaled for this volume, with key figures in behavioural ecology, philosophy, and the history of science adding to its wide-ranging relevance. Updating the reader on the debate currently live in behavioural ecology itself on the centrality of sexual selection, and with coverage of developments in the field of animal aesthetics, the book details the current state of play, while other chapters trace the history of sexual selection from Darwin to today and inquire into the neurobiological bases for partner choices and the comparisons between the hedonic brain in human and non-human animals. Welcome space is given to the social aspects of sexual selection, particularly where Darwin drew distinctions between eager males and coy females and rationalized this as evolutionary strategy. Also explored are the current definition of sexual selection (as opposed to natural selection) and its importance in todays biological research, and the impending critique of the theory from the nascent field of animal aesthetics. As a comprehensive assessment of the current health, or otherwise, of Darwins theory, 140 years after the publication of his Descent of Man, the book offers a uniquely rounded view that asks whether sexual selection is in itself a progressive or reactionary notion, even as it explores its theoretical relevance in the technical biological study of the twenty-first century. Read more...
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Part I
In Darwins Footsteps: Historical Issues
In Darwins Footsteps: Historical Issues
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Thierry Hoquet (ed.) Current Perspectives on Sexual Selection History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 10.1007/978-94-017-9585-2_11. Sexual Selection: Why Does it Play Such a Large Role in The Descent of Man ?
Michael Ruse 1
(1)
Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA
Michael Ruse
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Abstract
The Descent of Man is a strange book. About three-fifths is not on human beings at all, but an extended discussion of Charles Darwins secondary mechanism of sexual selection. I argue that although the book is surely a little unbalanced, overall the discussion fits into Darwins strategy of explaining and extending his thinking on evolution, and that truly it marks no significant theoretical shift from his earliest thinking about the nature and causes of evolution. Darwin saw the evolution of human beings at one with the evolution of all organisms.
Keywords
Alfred Russel Wallace Group selection Individual selection Hymenopteran sterility Hybridism Morality Human evolution1.1 Introduction
Charles Darwins two-volume The Descent of Man is in major respects a very odd book. Published in 1871, 12 years after Darwin published the Origin of Species , it is devoted to the evolution of our own species, humankind. Except it isnt really. Fully three-fifths is devoted to Darwins secondary evolutionary mechanism of sexual selection. The first of the two volumes opens in a conventional way with a discussion of human evolution, incuding our social evolution. Then it switches to an extended discussion and review of sexual selection, taking the reader over into the second volume. Finally, towards the end, Darwin returns to our own species and discusses further aspects of our evolution. There is no question but that in respects the discussion is out of kilter. Darwin would have done better to have lifted the discussion of sexual selection and made of it a separate book, perhaps using the subtitle to the Descent , Selection in Relation to Sex. Then he could have published a much-slimmed-down book on our own species, using the results of the book on sexual selection. As it is, Darwin did not have room in the Descent for everything he wanted to say about our species and so the next year (1872) published what is in effect a supplementary volume on our species, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and in Animals (Darwin
1.2 Natural Selection
Charles Darwins grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an evolutionist and Charles Darwin grew up knowing about this (Ruse 2008, 2012). However it was not until Charles Darwin was almost thirty that he himself made the move to transmutation (the word evolution applying to lifes history did not become popular for another 20 years). He did this in part because he had by then jettisoned Christianity and was looking for a law-bound (that is, non-miraculous) picture of the world; in part because of the fossil evidence he had seen in the past few years as he spent time in South America thanks to his status as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle ; and above all in part because of the peculiar distribution of birds and reptiles on the Galapagos Archipelago, the group of volcanic islands in the Pacific. How could there be different forms from island to island, else they had come from the mainland and changed as they moved from isolated retreat to isolated retreat?
As a graduate of the University of Cambridge, that institution whose greatest scientific alumnus was Isaac Newton, he who had given a causal underpinning to the Copernican Revolution, Darwin just knew he had to find an equivalent causal underpinning to evolutionary change. After some 18 months of frenzied thinking he found this in the fall of 1838, in the mechanism of natural selection. More organisms are born than can survive and reproduce. This leads to what the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus () had labeled a struggle for existence, and (as Darwin saw) even more a struggle for reproduction. There is constantly appearing natural variation and those that succeed in the struggle will tend to be different from those that do not. Moreover it will be the differences that help in the struggle and so there will be a constant winnowing or selecting of one kind of feature over another. Adding up, this leads to full-blown change.
But note that it is change of a particular kind. Organic features will be those that help their possessors to survive and reproduce. These features, adaptations, will have the design-like nature that previous thinkers had taken to be evidence of the good intentions of an extra-natural intelligence, better known as God. Although there is some controversy about this, it seems clear that a major factor behind all of Darwins thinking at this point was the analogy he was drawing between what happens in the world of animal and plant breeders and what happens thanks to blind law in the world of nature. Breeders select the forms that they want and start from there. Fatter pigs, shaggier sheep, fleshier turnips, andDarwin made much of thisever-yet-more fanciful pigeons. It is this vision of change that Darwin transferred to the wild world of animals and plants. From artificial selection to natural selection.
Darwin wrote out his ideas in a short piece (known now as the Sketch) in 1842 and in a much longer version (the Essay) in 1844 (Darwin ). But he did not publish and the years went by until in 1858 a young naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, sent Darwin a short piece with (quite independently discovered) just about all of Darwins ideas. Darwin then wrote things up quickly and towards the end of 1859 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life finally appeared in print. It is worth quoting the two pertinent passages. First to the struggle for existence.
A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them. (Darwin , p. 6364)
Then to natural selection:
Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an endless number of strange peculiarities our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, those under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. (Darwin , p. 8081)
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