[wellactually]

There is nothing new in this article causing scientists to rethink Evolution. Sexual selection, on the basis of physical traits (weaponry or ornaments), has been known and observed since Darwin. Evolution doesn't produce the best adaptations to a given environment. Rather it produces the least worst. Reproduction of genes through generations is the name of the game.

[alexpetralia]

Evolution produces random features, which remain as long as you survive and reproduce.

So you may get totally ornamental or vestigial or obsolete features simply because they were never enough hindrance to reproduction. "Enough" is a key word - even features which are hindrances but do not offset pro-survival/pro-reproduction features will remain.

[whatshisface]

One thing I don't understand is how one species can appreciate the ornamental features of another. Human aesthetic criteria may direct the development of human features, but why do our aesthetic criteria positively appraise the features of many animals that we did not influence? One example would be birds, which are very beautiful but aren't even mammals.

[JamilD]

Ornamental features are not obsolete. Many animals are selected for their ornamental features, which may act as heuristics for fitness (both for the opposite sex in reproduction and for the same sex in combat/competitiveness). I know not all of the book is still considered wholly accurate, but Dawkins describes this at length in The Selfish Gene.

[alexpetralia]

True - ornamental was the wrong choice of wording. Ornamental features absolutely aid sexual selection.

[wellactually]

Indeed. It's alarming that such basic scientific literacy is eluding editors at the NY Times.

[AndrewKemendo]

Yes exactly this.

There are volumes and volumes on the changing nature of sexual selection over millennia by different species. It's striking that NYT would make this sound much larger than it is.

[mi100hael]

So nothing to see here?

TFA would indicate otherwise...

> Many of Darwin’s peers and successors ridiculed his proposal. To them, the idea that animals had such cognitive sophistication — and that the preferences of “capricious” females could shape entire species — was nonsense. Although never completely forgotten, Darwin’s theory of beauty was largely abandoned.

[wellactually]

Except that it wasn't. Sexual selection has been well-established as a process within natural selection for decades.

[ralusek]

It's also so obvious as to not even require evidence, honestly. If evolution is the propagation of certain gene adaptations through reproduction, then it goes without saying that any discriminatory element resulting in successful or unsuccessful reproduction, wherein the gene expression has an impact on the outcome, is necessarily involved in the existence of that trait.

[obelos]

Indeed. Sexual selection is the principal topic of Darwin's “Descent of Man.”