Anyone who’s watched the Netflix series “Our Planet” might remember the scene in which a blue-red bird meticulously rehearses a courtship dance with a Three of a Kind. If the choreography consisting of jumps and songs persuades a female, the alpha male is allowed to mate with him.
Ornithologist Richard Broome also addresses the eccentric courtship behavior of the blue-breasted pibra in his 2018 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “The Evolution of Beauty – Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Selection” and calls it “the most powerful sexual selection ever found in vertebrates”.. Because most males with Blue breasted have no chance with the selected females. However, they have to dance in the grandiose show so that one day they can become the alpha animals and reproduce.
With this and many other examples from bird life, Broome defends a recent-looking thesis: among many female birds, sexual independence prevails in mate selection. This is said to have led to certain aesthetic preferences such as the courtship dances of male bibras that have predominated evolutionarily.
With Darwin vs Darwin
Beauty as a criterion for selection? Broome thus counters the common assumption in evolutionary biology that the so-called sexual motifs of male birds express reproductive fitness – in other words, they represent “good genes” and thus healthy offspring. The idea is consistent with the principle of natural selection, known back to Charles Darwin.
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