Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Darwin’s Strangest Idea (Matt Ridley)

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple, even mutually beneficial, transaction. Many more treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst, and violence.

Matt Ridley revisits Darwin’s revelatory theory of mate choice through the close study of the peculiar rituals of birds, and considers how this mating process complicates our own view of human evolution.

Ridley also explores the scientific research into the evolution of bright colors, exotic ornaments, and elaborate displays in birds around the world. Charles Darwin thought the purpose of such displays was to “charm” females. Though Darwin’s theory was initially dismissed and buried for decades, recent scientific research has proven him newly right—there is a powerful evolutionary force quite distinct from natural selection: mate choice. In Birds, Sex and Beauty, Ridley reopens the history of Darwin’s vexed theory, laying bare a century of disagreement about an idea so powerful, so weird, and so wonderful, we may have yet to fully understand its implications.

Matt Ridley is the bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 (with Alina Chan). His books have sold over a million copies. Ridley served in the House of Lords from 2013 to 2021 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book is Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea.