Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea

' An] intriguing philosophical journey into a critical issue within evolutionary theory that for too long has remained unresolved.' --Wall Street Journal Matt Ridley is one of our finest science writers. This book is a treat for bird lovers and evolutionary biologists alike.' --Richard Dawkins, author of The Genetic Book of The Dead and The God Delusion The New York Times bestselling author of Genome and The Evolution of Everything revisits Darwin's revelatory theory of mate choice through the close study of the peculiar rituals of birds, and considers how this mating process complicates our own view of human evolution. In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple, even mutually beneficial, transaction. Many more treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst, and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley's investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an arduous and even