The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex lizx

Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1979. Full Calf. In exceptionally good condition. Royal octavo, [ 27cm/10.75 inches], full gilt-embossed ebony calf sans dust jacket, -as issued-, pp. xvi, 362, indexed. Colour frontis and 4 textual illustrations by Fritz Kendel . Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. ... The Smithsonian noted: "Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species rattled Victorian readers in 1859, even though it said almost nothing about how the idea of evolution applied to human beings. A dozen years later, in 1871, he tackled that subject head-on. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published 150 years ago this month, Darwin argued forcefully that all creatures were subject to the same natural laws, and that humans had evolved over countless eons, just as other animals had. “Man,” he wrote, “still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” In Descent, Darwin details a theory that he calls “sexual selection”—the idea that, in many species, males battle other males for access to females, while in other species females choose the biggest or most attractive males to bond with. The male-combat theory would explain, for example, the development of a bull’s horns, or a moose’s antlers, while the quintessential example of “female choice” is seen in peahens, which, Darwin argued, prefer to mate with peacocks having the biggest, most colorful tails. For Darwin, sexual selection was just as important as natural selection, which he had outlined in Origin—the idea that organisms with favorable traits are more likely to reproduce, thus passing on those traits to their offspring. Both mechanisms helped to explain how species evolved over time."