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senseless shapes and behaviors that function only to promote victory in the great game of mating and reproduction. No other world but Darwin’s would fill nature with such curiosities that weaken species and hinder good design but bring success where it really matters in Darwin’s universe alone—passing more genes to future generations.
    Darwin realized that natural selection in its usual sense—increasing adaptation to changing local environments—would not explain this large class of features evolved to secure purely reproductive benefits for individuals. So he christened a parallel process, sexual selection, to explain this crucial evidence. He argued that sexual selection might work by combat among males or choice by females: the first to produce overblown weapons and instruments of display; the second to encourage those adornments and elaborate posturings that impel notice and acceptance (the nightingale does not sing for our delectation).
    Humans enter the story at this point. Why did Darwin choose his long and detailed treatise on sexual selection as a home for his much shorter preface on the Descent of Man? The answer again lies in Darwin’s fascination with specific puzzles and the contribution made by their solution to his larger goal. The Descent of Man has its anchor in a particular problem of human racial variation; it is not a waffling treatise on generalities. We can, Darwin argues, understand some racial differences, skin colors for example, as conventional adaptations to local environments (dark skin evolved several times independently and always in tropical climates). But surely we cannot argue that all the small, subtle differences among peoples—minor but consistent variations in the shape and form of noses and ears or the texture of hair—have their origin in what local environments ordain. It would be a vulgar caricature of natural selection to argue, by clever invention, that each insignificant nuance of design is really an optimal configuration for local circumstances (although many overzealous votaries continue to promote this view. A prominent evolutionist once seriously proposed to me that Slavic languages are full of consonants because mouths are best kept closed in cold weather, while Hawaiian has little but vowels because the salutary air of oceanic islands should be savored and imbibed). How then, if not by ordinary natural selection, did these small and subtle, but pervasive, racial differences originate?
    Darwin proposes—and I suspect he was largely right—that different standards of beauty arise for capricious reasons among the various and formerly isolated groups of humans that people the far corners of our earth. These differences—a twist of the nose here, slimmer legs there, a curl in the hair somewhere else—are then accumulated and intensified by sexual selection, since those individuals accidentally endowed with favored features are more sought and therefore more successful in reproduction.
    Look at the organization of the Descent of Man and you will see that this argument, not the generalities, provides its focus. The book begins with an overview of some 250 pages, all leading to a final chapter on human races and a presentation of the central paradox on the last page.
    We have thus far been baffled in all our attempts to account for the differences between the races of man; but there remains one important agency, namely Sexual Selection, which appears to have acted powerfully on man, as on many other animals…. In order to treat this subject properly, I have found it necessary to pass the whole animal kingdom in review.
    Darwin now has his handle for the real meat of his book, and he spends more than twice as much space, the next 500 pages, on a detailed account of sexual selection in group after group of organisms. Finally, in three closing chapters, he returns to human racial variation and completes his solution of the paradox by ascribing our differences primarily to