Darwin first proposed the theory of sexual selection
in "On the Origin of Species," it's actually
described in there, but my paper is about
the book in which he elaborates
on the theory, "The Descent of Man
and Selection in Relation to Sex," because that's
the definitive work from Darwin
on sexual selection. The book starts
out explaining how evolutionary principles
apply to humans, and then Darwin goes:
but wait a minute, to understand how it applies
to humans, you actually have to understand
this process of sexual selection. And so then
he writes pages and pages,
hundreds of pages on sexual selection so that
you can understand it well enough to understand
human evolution. The main point of the paper
is to ask the question:
what did Darwin get right,
and what aspects of sexual selection
do we still need to work on?
