Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

  • The Evolution of Beauty

  • How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us
  • By: Richard O. Prum
  • Narrated by: Dan Woren
  • Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (13 ratings)
Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
The Evolution of Beauty cover art

The Evolution of Beauty

By: Richard O. Prum
Narrated by: Dan Woren
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £13.00

Buy Now for £13.00

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

A Taste for the Beautiful cover art
The Hidden World cover art
The Origin of Humankind cover art
Sex at Dawn cover art
Blueprint cover art
Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You cover art
The Selfish Gene cover art
Guns, Germs and Steel cover art
The Righteous Mind cover art
Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life cover art
The Aesthetic Brain cover art
The Creative Spark cover art
The Better Angels of Our Nature cover art
The Bonobo and the Atheist cover art
Moral Animal cover art
The Believing Brain cover art

Summary

A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences - what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful" - create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world.

In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature?

Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum - reviving Darwin's own views - thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: club-winged manakins who sing with their wings, great argus pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3-D spheres, red-capped manakins who moonwalk. In 30 years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection, in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons - for the mere pleasure of it - is an independent engine of evolutionary change.

Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time.

The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.

©2017 Richard O. Prum (P)2017 Random House Audio

What listeners say about The Evolution of Beauty

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    6
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Profound and beautiful insights

The theory advanced in this book is I think wonderful and hugely plausible, it solves a number of explanatory challenges while presenting a much richer, deeper and more pleasing view of the world and our place in it than the conventions I grew up with. I have long found the common insistence on ignoring or denying the experience of animals frustrating and inexplicable, and by taking mate choice seriously the author gives this solid footing and delivers a number of very resonant and satisfying insights.

I did struggle slightly at first with a lot of descriptions of birds and their behaviour, and the narration is not amazing (some misleading inflections and no particular life brought to the reading, but basically fine.. may be more enjoyable as an actual book perhaps), but for me it was well worth it in the end. I will definitely be bringing the ideas and insights up in future conversations!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful