Erasmus Darwin saw sexual selection before his grandson

摘要

I must leap to the defence of Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus. It is not the case that, as David J. Hosken says in his Correspondence, "no one else envisaged anything like sexual selection" before Charles Darwin (Nature 458, 831; 2009). His grandfather had done so more than 50 years earlier.rnIn his book Zoonomia (Johnson, 1794), Erasmus writes: "the three great objects of desire, which have changed the forms of many animals by their exertions to gratify them, are those of lust, hunger, and security".