The Film (Synopsis)
The Film (Synopsis)
The Evolution of Beauty
A Feature Documentary Film
The evolution of beauty and desire in the natural world and in ourselves.
What can explain the incredible diversity of beauty in nature
In The Evolution of Beauty, Richard O. Prum’s award-winning career as an ornithologist and his lifelong passion for bird watching come together in a thrilling intellectual adventure. Scientific dogma holds that every detail of an animal’s mating displays– every spot on the peacock’s tail– is an advertisement of its genetic or material superiority to potential mates. But 30 years of research and fieldwork around the world led Prum to question this idea. Deep in tropical jungles are birds with a dizzying array of plumages, songs, and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. Many such traits struck Prum as outlandishly unlikely to provide practical information. His search for answers led him to a little-acclaimed theory of Darwin’s, aesthetic mate choice, or “the taste for the beautiful.” Darwin proposed that choosing a mate for the mere pleasure of it creates an independent engine of evolutionary change.
With warmth and wit, our film will follow Prum and his colleagues as they explore how Darwin’s idea was sidelined by squeamish Victorians and what it means for our understanding of evolution to revive it 150 years later. The film will offer a new perspective not only of birds—finding surprising and uplifting discoveries in the violent world of duck sex – we will also connect the same evolutionary dynamics to the origins and diversity of human sexuality. We will explore riveting new thinking about the evolution of human beauty, the female orgasm, and same-sex sexual behavior. And in the series’ intellectual climax, we will explore the essential role for female mate choice in shaping human maleness, transforming our ancestors from typical infanticidal primates into socially intelligent, pair bonding caregivers.
The Evolution of Beauty will be a beautiful, captivating and exhilarating tour de force that begins in the trees and ends by fundamentally challenging how we understand human evolution and ourselves.
The Film – Areas of focus:
Beauty Happens: Most evolutionary biologists think that the peacocks tail has evolved because its colors encode honest information about objective mate quality. Darwin, however, proposed that sexual ornaments evolve because they are beautiful to the animals. From a Darwinian view, animals are active agents in their own evolution. Through examples from research on manakins, pheasants, birds of paradise, and other birds, Prum shows us that contemporary evolutionary biology needs to embrace an authentically Darwinian, aesthetic perspective on sexual selection to adequately describe the natural world.
Freedom of Choice Matters: The film will explore evolutionary responses to sexual conflict: i.e. what happens when the freedom of mate choice is infringed or disrupted by sexual coercion and sexual violence. Through examples of research on duck sex, bowerbirds, and manakin and grouse leks, we will see how sexual autonomy– the capacity to achieve one’s mating preferences without disruption– has evolved in birds. We will show that this as a genuinely feminist scientific discovery– freedom of choice matters to animals. The result yields an entirely new perspective on the origin of avian beauty.
Humans, Beauty, and Pleasure. The film will investigate the role of aesthetic mate choice, in the evolution of human sexuality and sexual pleasure. Compared to our ape ancestors, humans are sexually selective and have evolved multiple sexual ornaments. We will see how female choice was essential in the transformation of ancestral male hominids from typical infanticidal primates into socially intelligent, pair bonding, loving, paternal caregivers. With their reduced canines and lower sexual size dimorphism than bonobos, human males have been evolutionarily de-weaponized by female choice, and only culturally rearmed. This evolutionary history of mutual mate choice has led to an expanded frequency, duration, and social function of sexuality in human lives. The enhanced role of sexual pleasure in humans likely contributed to the expansion of orgasmic pleasure in women and men. We will conclude with the new hypothesis that human diversity in sexual attraction and same-sex behavior have evolved because sexual variation undermines hierarchical male sexual control and fosters the expansion of female sexual autonomy.