Birds, Sex, and Beauty by Matt Ridley

Birds, Sex, and Beauty:

The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea

By Matt Ridley

Harper 2025

Matt Ridley opens his new book with a description of a lek, a mating gathering of Black Grouse in the Pennine Hills, which he gamely describes:

It’s a sex market, in which the male suppliers of sperm fight for the right to satisfy very discerning female customers and usually only one male succeeds. Every day between March and June (and less frenetically between October and February) these same birds will gather at this one secret spot on a grassy moor in the Pennine hills and take part in a frenzy of dancing, singing and occasionally vicious fighting for about three hours in the early morning. Each bird – unless or until he is injured, or promoted when his neighbor is wounded or killed – will occupy the exact same square on the chessboard all season, furiously defending his little patch and displaying incessantly for the benefit of any visiting female, a slave to his horny hormones.

Readers already know from the enormous subtitle of Ridley’s book that this is going to be his introduction to the idea of “sexual selection” pressures outlined by Charles Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man (something last popularly explored in Richard Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty back in 2017), so those readers will settle in for the chapter or so that it takes Ridley to quit lekking around and get down to business.

Then, mid-way through the second chapter, the ghastly reality dawns: Ridley isn’t just a top-notch and best-selling science writer – he’s a birder. He’s got horny grouse all over the ground in front of him, and he’s not going anywhere any time soon. 

He describes all the birds. The males are more easily identifiable than the females. The fighting is often severe, sometimes fatal, for the males. There’s a good deal of fancy dancing and fanning of tail feathers. And Ridley describes it all, page after page, with plenty of his own photos and, in an excess of dorky enthusiasm that’s a sure sign of birder dementia, he includes his best attempt at phonetically describing the various squawks and squeals of his horny fowls. 

“Hoo-doodle-woo-doodle- WOO-hoo,” “naair-na-naaair,”  “choc-ke-ra-da” and so on. Non-birders will begin to consider lekking themselves. 

Ridley eventually gets around to Darwin – Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, whose 1794 book Zoonomia, according to Evelleen Richards, “portrayed a universe governed by the sexual principle, by love and desire.” Portly old Erasmus naturally thought this, since he never met a barmaid he didn’t want to lek on a lark. “This animal attraction is love,” he wrote, “which constitutes the purest source of human felicity, the cordial drop in the otherwise vapid cup of life.” 

Charles Darwin took these notions further in The Descent of Man, positing, at the very least, “the power of sexual selection as an explanation for beauty in birds.” The idea was discounted or dismissed even by most of Darwin’s supporters over the ensuing decades, but Ridley is far from the first to think there are large parts of it that are worth pursuing, especially in the bird world (think of peacocks, the most famous example) but also elsewhere. How many species have one sex going to increasingly extravagant, even dangerous, extents in order to impress the other sex? 

Ridley brings up a scientist named Robert Trivers, who broken things down very simply: “Whichever sex invests the least time, risk and energy in reproduction does the proposing, and whichever sed invests the most does the disposing.” Trivers suggested that the less males contribute, the more they will compete over female and the valuable resource they represent. The more males invest, the more selective they too will be.” It’s easy to see obvious truth in such a proposition, more gamely put by an ornithologist friend of Ridley who bluntly tells him that the reason birds are so beautiful is because they don’t have penises – referring to the fact the most birds (not ducks, not ostriches, but most birds) as adults lack a penis, using “a simple unisex cloaca” instead, because “females have selected males with shorter penises till they were altogether gone, as a means – unconsciously – of gaining control over mating.”

“What did female birds do with this freedom of choice?” the author’s ornithologist friend continued.. “They chose beauty. Freedom begets beauty in nature and that’s a completely scientific statement.”

Whether or not that’s a true statement, it certainly feels like a right one, and it’s possible that there will be some readers stony-hearted enough to wish Ridley had spent more time examining it than he does sitting out in fields and marshes in damp long underwear and night goggles. Fortunately, he redeems his obsession with frequent passages of downright lyrical enthusiasm for the whole subject of what avian beauty actually means – and what, for that matter, it even actually looks like. “When we human beings wax lyrical about the beauty of a bird of paradise or a sunset, we are mere beginners, naive dullards glimpsing what the real gods of color can do, and not appreciating it in its full glory,” he writes (inadvertently brushing against what should obviously have been the title of this book, “The Gods of Color”). “Indeed, the fact that birds can see ultraviolet colours is testimony to the fact that we mammals are truly ignorant of the glories of the world around us.” 

He summarizes: “Mammals are prose; birds are poetry.” A completely scientific statement. 

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News