Most contemporary research on sexual selection treats mating preferences as evolving by natural selection for honest information about quality or condition, or for sensory efficiency. However, Darwin's own view was explicitly aesthetic. Dr. Prum advocates a return to Darwin's aesthetic view of sexual selection by mate choice, in which the arbitrary sexual selection mechanism of Lande and Kirkpatrick is the null model. If mate preferences are not always under natural selection, it is necessary to recognize the role of emergent agency of mate choice in evolutionary process. Thus, mate choice gives rise to sexual autonomy. Because of the indirect costs of sexual coercion, sexual autonomy will evolve to assert and expand its own control over fertilization in the face of sexual conflict. Sexual autonomy is enhanced through either evolved mechanisms of resistance or novel aesthetic preferences that have secondary limiations on sexual coercion. These issues in sexual selection and aesthetic evolution will be discussed with examples for birds and humans.

Sponsored by the Museum of Zoology Robert W. Storer Endowment