The roles of beauty, aesthetics and signaling in evolutionary selection
June 23, 2017 8:56 AM   Subscribe

What Duck Sex Reveals about Human Nature. An interview with Dr. Richard O. Prum, ornithologist and curator at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Possibly NSFW: article includes a drawing of an aroused duck.

Further Reading
(All of the following links may be NSFW.)

* DuckPenisGate, previously on MeFi by Blasdelb. That post includes the journal article in the following list.
* New York Times: "Challenging Mainstream Thought About Beauty’s Big Hand in Evolution: Are aesthetic judgments about mates invariably tied to traits we see as adaptive and worth passing on? Or, does beauty just ‘happen’?"
* National Geographic: "Why It Matters Who Females Choose to Have Sex With"
* The New Yorker: "Duck Sex and the Patriarchy: Why freedom of choice matters to animals, and what that tells us about human culture."
* The paper: "Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia by Patricia L. R. Brennan, Christopher J. Clark, Richard O. Prum" includes a digital supplement with videos and images.

Also
* Yale Alumni (2011): "The bird-filled world of Richard Prum: How an ornithologist discovered new kinds of color, proved T. rex had feathers, and answered the question “What is art?”"
posted by zarq (29 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite


 
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to phrase the NSFW warning in this post. How exactly does one put a warning in a post regarding visible duck peen without sounding like a loon? Is duck sex even worth warning people about? Does anyone care? Do employers penalize (errrrr) their workers for watching duck erection and ejaculation videos?

Didn't go with "NSFW: Duck is happy to see you" or "NSFW: CONTAINS NAUGHTY NAUGHTY DUCK PORN." Probably for the best.
posted by zarq at 9:10 AM on June 23, 2017 [11 favorites]


You could have also gone with "THATS NOT AN EARTHWORM".
posted by dr_dank at 9:21 AM on June 23, 2017 [6 favorites]


Life is like a hurricane/War-ning: Dick Tales
posted by beerperson at 9:23 AM on June 23, 2017 [11 favorites]


How exactly does one put a warning in a post regarding visible duck peen without sounding like a loon?

Loons have their own interests, and do not, as a rule, traffic in duck pornography, than you very much. Don't put all waterfowl in the same basket!
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:24 AM on June 23, 2017 [18 favorites]


Do employers penalize (errrrr) their workers for watching duck erection and ejaculation videos?

depends on if it's scientific in nature or an imaginative reinterpretation of the works of Carl Barks, and while I was neither happy with the length or tone of the meeting I think my HR department had their horizons expanded a little bit
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:26 AM on June 23, 2017 [17 favorites]


This far in and nobody's rhymed duck and fuck yet?
posted by jonmc at 9:37 AM on June 23, 2017 [6 favorites]


Great post!
posted by mumimor at 9:42 AM on June 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


How exactly does one put a warning in a post regarding visible duck peen without sounding like a loon?

Don't sound like this I guess.
posted by GuyZero at 9:51 AM on June 23, 2017


article includes a drawing of an aroused duck.

When did we start doing FPPs on used middle school math textbooks?
posted by nickmark at 10:20 AM on June 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


That interview was fascinating. Thank you!
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 10:28 AM on June 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


By the way, I think this is the essential reason why birds are so beautiful.

O RLY
posted by nickmark at 10:30 AM on June 23, 2017 [5 favorites]


The article has a bit of an odd tone to it — I wonder how much of that is the translation. I also wonder a bit about how much of his primatology is just-so. Paging ChuraChura, I guess.
posted by klangklangston at 10:34 AM on June 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


Note that in the comments of the Previous DuckPenisGate post there are links to all the many previousliers of this important topic on MetaFilter.
posted by Kabanos at 10:48 AM on June 23, 2017 [1 favorite]




Prior to the publication of this book, Richard Prum gave a terrific lecture at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City about a year ago entitled "The Evolution of Beauty: from Warblers to Warhol" . You can watch a video.
posted by Jackson at 12:12 PM on June 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'd love to hear opposing viewpoints on this theory but it is a beautiful one. I had no idea infanticide was so common in apes.
posted by macrael at 1:54 PM on June 23, 2017


That is how we discovered that the genitalia of ducks regress and regrow each year, so that a 10- or 15-centimeter penis in the summer will reduce to less than 1 centimeter in the winter and then grow back the next year.
IT IS VERY COLD WATER
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:15 PM on June 23, 2017 [7 favorites]


Loons have their own interests, and do not, as a rule, traffic in duck pornography, than you very much. Don't put all waterfowl in the same basket!

NOT ALL WATERFOWL
posted by zarq at 2:16 PM on June 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


Do employers penalize (errrrr) their workers for watching duck erection and ejaculation videos?

And then in some of our workplaces, it's positively work-related....

More seriously, this is kind of a weird interview regarding ethics and female autonomy. It's not "nature intervening to protect female autonomy"; it's females who can best resist male attempts to override their autonomy doing better over the long term and becoming more frequent, given frequent male rape attempts. This isn't a process that happens without female ducks acting in accordance with their own interests, and the framing and phrasing seem to erase that autonomy in a way I side-eye just slightly.

The long-lasting nature of the cloacal kiss meaning that female choice (vs. actively discouraged copulation attempts) being particularly common in birds is weird, also. Ducks themselves demonstrate that clades of birds have no problem evolving penises over the long term; I'd suspect there's something else going on there besides just "cloacal kiss prevents evolution of rape because it makes rape more difficult." Presumably duck forced copulations evolved before the penis itself did, given the timing of its use and growth. Why don't other clades do the same thing? Scientists often seem weirdly attached to ideas about tissue-specific mechanisms being immutable and static over time, like a common mechanism prevents the evolution of novel structures or timings wholesale. I generally suspect the story is a little more complicated than that, me.

I am rolling my eyes at the primatology so hard--chimp sexual receptivity is a lot more complex than he's making it sound here. It's also worth pointing out that in both chimps and gorillas, social systems and social structures severely impact mating choice and mating strategies as a consequence of the way the societies of these species handle social behavior and social dynamics, neither of which are particularly similar to humans.

The "chimps are sexually indiscriminate so they have no sense of beauty" thing is just.... oh my god, buddy, stick to your fucking ducks! The duck side of the story is marginally interesting; the moment he leaves the territory of ducks this guy is so facile that I wouldn't trust a word out of his mouth.
posted by sciatrix at 2:28 PM on June 23, 2017 [9 favorites]


seriously it took me like five minutes to do a search on "mate choice chimpanzees" in google, which yielded several results pointing out that while females are actively punished by dominant males they do seem to at least attempt to exercise agency and choice on their own, either in the form of soliciting preferred males or--and this is fucking inexcusable coming from this dude given his course of study--potentially via cryptic female chocie, which is literally the exact thing going on in his ducks.

Those results also included a hugely classic paper that discusses chimpanzees in some detail when discussing why there may be costs to exerting mate choice, particularly social costs, by the way.

which, if a female is willing to risk punishment to the extent that males have to engage in it, that kind of tells us that females have preferences they exert when they can, depending on consequence to themselves

christ on a crutch man, leave sexual selection to specialists
posted by sciatrix at 2:35 PM on June 23, 2017 [12 favorites]


apparently I only surface onto Metafilter these days to express overwrought disgust at the state of science these days

I should probably feel bad about that but eh
posted by sciatrix at 2:36 PM on June 23, 2017 [4 favorites]


That is how we discovered that the genitalia of ducks regress and regrow each year, so that a 10- or 15-centimeter penis in the summer will reduce to less than 1 centimeter in the winter and then grow back the next year.
It's just COLD OUT, ALRIGHT!
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 3:57 PM on June 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


Only came to the thread because of the warning "Possibly NSFW: article includes a drawing of an aroused duck." Was not disappointed, and I still haven't seen the duck dong yet.
posted by Mcable at 4:32 PM on June 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


sciatrix, thanks for the links, corrections, clarifications and rebuttal. Very edifying!
posted by zarq at 4:47 PM on June 23, 2017 [4 favorites]


Or here is another one: A researcher in Sweden discovered a marsh warbler singing a song of a bird from its wintering grounds in Uganda. This warbler introduced aesthetic content from another continent into the acoustic environment of Europe. I can't imagine anything that humans could do that is aesthetically as fascinating as that.

This guy's mind is going to be TOTALLY BLOWN when he hears rock n roll for the first time!
posted by peeedro at 5:31 PM on June 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


MetaFilter: oh my god, buddy, stick to your fucking ducks!
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:01 PM on June 23, 2017


Such a great article! thank you for posting
posted by stevedawg at 6:36 AM on June 24, 2017


"Of course, in the short run, females struggle to escape from forced copulations."

Wow, that's a REALLY quick gloss-over of the fact that gang rape is distressingly common among ducks.

This guy should look up that politician who said rape victims don't get pregnant because the female body has ways of shutting that down. Sounds like they'd get along famously.
posted by Brachinus at 9:12 AM on June 25, 2017


"Wow, that's a REALLY quick gloss-over of the fact that gang rape is distressingly common among ducks.

This guy should look up that politician who said rape victims don't get pregnant because the female body has ways of shutting that down. Sounds like they'd get along famously.
"

Guess what? Most animals are pretty amoral beasts! Evolutionary strategies are descriptive; the "legitimate rape" guy was trying to make a normative point.
posted by klangklangston at 5:02 PM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


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