Edge.org
September 3, 2014
http://www.edge.org
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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"The way nature is?the nature of flowers, the nature of
birdsong and bird plumages?implies that subjective experiences are fundamentally
important in biology. That the world looks the way it does and is the way it is
because of their vital importance as sources of selection in organic diversity,
and as a result we need to structure evolutionary biology to recognize the
aesthetic, recognize the subjective experience.
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"...ducks are one of the few birds that still have a penis.
It's a very weird structure. It has an explosive erection, its erection
mechanisms are lymphatic instead of vascular, it's stored outside-in inside the
cloaca and comes flying out, and they can get very lengthy?up to 40 centimeters,
which is over a foot long on a duck that is itself not even a foot long. It's an
extraordinary piece of biology. What's going on in these ducks?
"In lots of ducks there's forced copulation. It's the
equivalent of rape in ducks. In species where there is a lot of forced
copulation, females have evolved or co-evolved complex vaginal morphologies that
frustrate the intromission or frustrate entry of the penis during forced
copulation. For example, the penis of ducks is counter-clockwise coiled and
often has ridges or even teeth-like structures on the outside. In this case, in
these species, the female has evolved a vagina that has dead end cul-de-sacs, so
that if the penis goes down the wrong direction it?ll get bottled up and doesn?t
perceive to be closer to the oviduct, or further up the oviduct and closer to
ova. And then above the cul-de-sacs, the duck vagina has clockwise coils, so
there's literally anti-screw devices that prevent intromission during forced
copulation."
DUCK SEX, AESTHETIC EVOLUTION, AND THE ORIGIN OF
BEAUTY
A Conversation with Richard Prum
Edge Video
[1 hour]
RICHARD PRUM is an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale
University, where he is the Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of
Vertebrate Zoology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
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DUCK SEX, AESTHETIC EVOLUTION, AND THE ORIGIN OF
BEAUTY
Over the last few years I've realized that a large portion
of the work that I've been doing on bird color, on birdsong, on the evolution of
display behavior, is really about one fundamental and important topic, and
that's beauty?the role of beauty in nature and how it evolves. The question I'm
asking myself a lot now is: what is beauty and how does it evolve? What are the
consequences of beauty and its existence in nature?
There's a long history of people thinking about ornament in
nature?those aspects of the body or the behavior of organisms that are
attractive, which function in perception of other organisms. Usually we think
about this in terms of sexual selection or mate choice, but there's a bunch of
other contexts in which it can occur, like flowers attracting pollinators and
fruits attracting frugivores, or even the opposite?a rattlesnake or a poisonous
butterfly scaring away predators. These are all aspects of the body that
function not in the regular way but in perception. ...[MORE]
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