Richard O. Prum is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. He has conducted field work throughout the world, and has studied fossil theropod dinosaurs in China. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.
发表于2024-11-02
The Evolution of Beauty 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书
什么是美?谁来定义美?美在不同的时代与社会中又是如何变化的?美存在于人类社会,亦存在于动物界,假如美有人或动物中的某一部分个体或群体主导,那么这个主导的人是谁?——这些宏大的问题必然三言两语难以尽述,因此不妨化繁为简,从相对简单一些的鸟类谈起,这也便是《美...
评分The Evolution of Beauty 英文版刚刚上市时,我就在不少国外科普媒体上注意到了它。当时我还算半个“自由撰稿人”(说的太好听了,实际上就是四处给别人码点儿字写科普),对自然博物类科普的话题一直很感兴趣。这本书一经出版便受到了学界与科普界的高度关注,随之而来的则是...
评分The Evolution of Beauty 英文版刚刚上市时,我就在不少国外科普媒体上注意到了它。当时我还算半个“自由撰稿人”(说的太好听了,实际上就是四处给别人码点儿字写科普),对自然博物类科普的话题一直很感兴趣。这本书一经出版便受到了学界与科普界的高度关注,随之而来的则是...
评分 评分11/03/2017 最近看到有人提起,就贴过来吧。 刚听这本书时候的一点小片段。其实后面的内容不止这些,蛮有趣的。 昨天煮饭时听到一段关于duck sex的内容,差点笑喷了,很有意思也很有意义,所以要记一下。 前面都在讲鸟儿们的迁徙特性、羽毛和歌声,narrator还时不时学学鸟叫。...
图书标签: 科普 进化论 非虚构 生物学 心理学 2017 英文 美国
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 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty 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.
最后两章不行,私货过多。
评分有一些很有批判性的创见,但私货也不少,关键是说服力欠佳。
评分作者说鸟类世界许多现象无法被适者生存解释,而被雌性的择偶和审美追求影响,像孔雀开屏园丁鸟搭凉亭。最后几章延伸到人类社会,用女性的性选择来解释为什么人类没有阴茎骨,男性同性恋比例比女性高。被选择的男性并不是被动的,所以野鸭会使用性暴力。书很有趣,只是很难想象这个女性选择的机制竟会让女性演化成弱势群体。关于这一点,作者只提了一句,农业革命给了男性物质上的优势。
评分将达尔文被忽视的伴侣选择理论深化并延伸,提供新视角来审视择偶偏好的形成和进化,否定且diss了以自然选择为基础的主流观点和进化心理学理论,强调“美”和女性择偶偏好的主导作用。作为去年纽约时段的十佳,很值得读,里面众多观点很有趣。
评分从观鸟到择偶,handicap theory和证明adaptive theory的零假设蛮耳目一新。蛮多篇幅在人类的性器官和择偶演化,倒是现在的共识了。
The Evolution of Beauty 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书