Evelleen Richards's Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection is an ambitious undertaking, offering by far the most comprehensive account of the development of Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Richards 'explores the intellectual and social roots' of Darwin's theory, 'analyzes its stages of theory building in his published and unpublished writings and its elaboration in The Descent of Man, and reviews its contemporary reception, reinterpretations and applications' (p. xxix). Richards lavishes on sexual selection the kind of treatment previously reserved by historians for natural selection. This attention is long overdue, for sexual selection, as Richards rightly insists, was more clearly Darwin's own creation. The co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, not only rejected sexual selection but was its most cogent and influential critic, and few among even the most ardent supporters of Darwinism endorsed it. Richards makes clear why that was, from the heavily anecdotal and inferential nature of Darwin's evidence and the unacknowledged contradictions his positions often led him into, to the culturally difficult-to-swallow pills of female choice, refined aesthetic sensibilities in some animals and racially-distinct standards of beauty.
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