Speaker

Richard Prum

Richard Prum

Evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University and author of The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us (2017), which won the Yale Phi Beta Kappa Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Prum has spent his career on the evolution of bird plumage and song, the developmental biology of feathers, and the deep history of bird origins from theropod dinosaurs. He is best known among general readers for reviving and extending Darwin’s neglected theory of aesthetic evolution — the idea that mate choice can drive traits far beyond what genetic quality would predict, producing beauty for its own sake rather than as a reliable signal of fitness. He started birding at ten in rural Vermont, and his self-described ‘minority style of mind’ in science — asking what he finds coolest rather than what the field currently prizes — has been as influential on his intellectual identity as any methodological commitment.

Core positions

Beauty is not a proxy for fitness. Prum’s central argument is that the Fisherian runaway mechanism — in which genes for preference and genes for a preferred trait become genetically correlated, and selection on one automatically drives selection on the other — can produce autonomous aesthetic evolution disconnected from any underlying quality signal. This puts him at odds with the mainstream adaptationist view, which treats elaborate avian displays as honest advertisements of mate quality. He does not deny the correlation between health and attractiveness; he denies that the correlation establishes the mechanism.

He extends this to animal subjectivity more broadly: bees make genuine aesthetic choices about flowers, birds have genuine culture (song dialects transmitted across generations for tens of millions of years), and corvids and parrots have cognitive depth that rivals primates despite brains a fraction of the size. Putting the subjective experience of the animal at the analytical centre, he argues, produces more accurate biology than optimisation models do.

On scientific practice, he defends situated knowledge — Donna Haraway’s term for the view from somewhere specific rather than the view from nowhere — as more generative than prestige-tracking. The scientist who cares passionately about house wrens in Ohio, and is not embarrassed to say so, finds questions the generalist misses.

In the wiki