Richard O. Prum est un ornithologue évolutionniste aux intérêts variés, se concentrant sur l'évolution et le comportement des oiseaux. Son travail explore des sujets allant de la phylogénétique et du développement évolutif à la coloration structurelle et à la sélection sexuelle. Grâce à un travail de terrain approfondi dans le monde entier et à des études sur les dinosaures fossiles, il contribue à une compréhension plus profonde du monde aviaire. Sa recherche révèle les mécanismes complexes des processus évolutifs et la beauté du règne aviaire.
A "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"-- Provided by publisher
"We are living through a time of enormous cultural change involving broad reconsideration of ideas about individual sex, gender, their boundaries, their meanings, and their mutabilities. There is a growing realization of the diversity of lived gender identities and sexual experiences. Performance All the Way Down is a manifesto for today. It initiates needed dialogue between feminist thought and the science of sex by explaining all the avenues of sexual differentiation from zygote to gendered adult to argue, with an absorbing clarity, against the existence of the sexual binary. Richard O. Prum, author of The Evolution of Beauty, turns his attention in this book from beauty to sex. What is sex? And what does it mean, scientifically, to question the essentialist, binary concept of sex? Performance All the Way Down poses a new view on these complex questions. For Prum argues that the ways in which a single-celled, fertilized zygote becomes a complex, conscious organism with gender and sexual behavior is best described scientifically as a complex performative continuum. His idea of the performative phenotype challenges the twentieth century isolation of developmental biology from evolutionary biology and the strict conception of gene-level selection, providing an alternative view of what being genetic actually means"--
Darwins vergessene Theorie zur Partnerwahl
Die meisten Merkmale im Tierreich lassen sich evolutionsbiologisch durch natürliche Auslese erklären: Sie bieten einen Überlebensvorteil gegenüber anderen und haben sich deshalb durchgesetzt. Anders sieht es dagegen bei den farbenprächtigen Federkleidern und dem hochkomplexen und aufwendigen Balzverhalten vieler Vogelmännchen aus: Wie konnten sich diese schönen, aber aus evolutionsbiologischer Sicht scheinbar sinnlosen, ja hinderlichen Merkmale überhaupt entwickeln?