“There Remains the Female”: How the Theory of Avian Territory Eclipsed Sexual Selection after World War One

“There Remains the Female”: How the Theory of Avian Territory Eclipsed Sexual Selection after World War One

by David Hoyt  Do birds have a sense of beauty? Do they, or does any animal, have an aesthetic sense? Do they respond to beauty in ways we might find familiar – with a feeling of awe, suffused with attraction, mixed with joy? Do they seek it out, and perhaps even work to fashion it from their surroundings? Darwin thought so, and made the idea the subject of his second major work, The Descent of Man (1871). In it, he outlined a mechanism by which…