What can explain the incredible diversity of beauty in nature? Richard O. Prum, an award-winning ornithologist, discusses Charles Darwin's second and long-neglected theory--aesthetic mate choice--and what it means for our understanding of evolution. In addition, Prum connects those same evolutionary dynamics to the origins and diversity of human sexuality, offering riveting new thinking about the evolution of human beauty and the role of mate choice, thereby transforming our ancestors from typical infanticidal primates into socially intelligent, pair-bonding caregivers. Prum's book is an exhilarating tour de force that begins in the trees and ends by fundamentally challenging how we understand human evolution and ourselves. --

What can explain the incredible diversity of beauty in nature? Richard O. Prum, an award-winning ornithologist, discusses Charles Darwin's second and long-neglected theory--aesthetic mate choice--and what it means for our understanding of evolution. In addition, Prum connects those same evolutionary dynamics to the origins and diversity of human sexuality, offering riveting new thinking about the evolution of human beauty and the role of mate choice, thereby transforming our ancestors from typical infanticidal primates into socially intelligent, pair-bonding caregivers. Prum's book is an exhilarating tour de force that begins in the trees and ends by fundamentally challenging how we understand human evolution and ourselves. --

"We are living through a time of enormous cultural change involving broad reconsideration of ideas about individual sex, gender, their boundaries, their meanings, and their mutabilities. There is a growing realization of the diversity of lived gender identities and sexual experiences. Performance All the Way Down is a manifesto for today. It initiates needed dialogue between feminist thought and the science of sex by explaining all the avenues of sexual differentiation from zygote to gendered adult to argue, with an absorbing clarity, against the existence of the sexual binary. Richard O. Prum, author of The Evolution of Beauty, turns his attention in this book from beauty to sex. What is sex? And what does it mean, scientifically, to question the essentialist, binary concept of sex? Performance All the Way Down poses a new view on these complex questions. For Prum argues that the ways in which a single-celled, fertilized zygote becomes a complex, conscious organism with gender and sex