Sexual Selection: Why Does it Play Such a Large Role in The Descent of Man?

Abstract

The Descent of Man is a strange book. About three-fifths is not on human beings at all, but an extended discussion of Charles Darwin’s secondary mechanism of sexual selection. I argue that although the book is surely a little unbalanced, overall the discussion fits into Darwin’s strategy of explaining and extending his thinking on evolution, and that truly it marks no significant theoretical shift from his earliest thinking about the nature and causes of evolution. Darwin saw the evolution of human beings at one with the evolution of all organisms.