Birds, Sex, and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea, by Matt Ridley
Harper, 2025
352 pages, hardcover
ABA Sales–Buteo Books 15506
British science writer Matt Ridley’s newest book, Birds, Sex, and Beauty, is an attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: Why are some birds so astonishingly beautiful?
The answer, according to Ridley and others, is an idea that goes all the way back to Charles Darwin—sexual selection. Darwin argued that male birds are beautiful (and sing beautiful songs, do beautiful dances, and even build beautiful structures) because female birds choose to mate with the most beautiful males, ensuring their genes are the ones that are passed on to the next generation. But this idea that female birds are selecting for beauty and the question of why they would do such a thing have been the subjects of intense debate among evolutionary biologists from Darwin’s contemporaries to the present. It’s this history of competing theories and clever experiments that form the basis of Ridley’s book.
Ridley begins with a deep dive into Darwin’s correspondence on sexual selection with his friend and rival Alfred Russel Wallace, then continues into the twentieth century, when two dueling hypotheses to explain sexual selection vied for acceptance: “good genes” and “sexy sons.” The “good genes” hypothesis posits that females are choosing beautiful males because the males’ beautiful displays indicate that they are strong and healthy and will produce successful offspring. “Sexy sons,” on the other hand, is the argument that females are less concerned with having the healthiest offspring and more concerned with simply having the “sexiest” ones, hoping that their male chicks will inherit their fathers’ ability to display enticingly and attract plenty of their own mates in turn.
Interwoven with all this history is an effective framing device consisting of Ridley’s observations of a Black Grouse lek in Northern England. Many chapters begin with an immersive description of the bird behavior Ridley sees at the lek, where males display endlessly in hopes of impressing females, then launch into the relevant science.
In the preface to Birds, Sex, and Beauty, Ridley describes how this is a “different book from all of my previous ones about science” because it “aims at an ambitious fusion” of the two genres of science writing and nature writing. (He carries out this blending well, but he’s far from the first person to attempt it; authors from Rachel Carson to Robin Wall Kimmerer have been combining science and nature writing for decades.) I had heard of Matt Ridley’s best-known book, The Red Queen, but I hadn’t read any of his previous work, nor did I know anything about him. So early in my reading of Birds, Sex, and Beauty, I Googled him—and what I learned complicated how I felt about this book.
I’m reviewing a book that focuses specifically on sexual selection, not conservation, so should it matter that Ridley is a notorious climate change “denier” (his position seems to be not so much “climate change isn’t happening” as “climate change is good, actually”)? I’d argue that it does matter, at least so far as it makes me question his willingness to fairly evaluate information that doesn’t fit within his specific worldview. (In case you’re wondering, Ridley, in addition to being a popular science writer and trained evolutionary biologist, is a hereditary Viscount who has served in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords and lives on his family’s three-hundred-year-old estate in Northern England.)
And unfortunately, there are points at which Ridley’s views leak into the pages of Birds, Sex, and Beauty in ways that made me wince. For example, when discussing Greek and Christian myths about the origin of the peacock’s tail, he can’t resist getting in a dig at the current movement toward recognizing the value of Traditional Ecological Knowledge alongside Western science. “In these open-minded days when even Science magazine ‘highlights the value of teaching Indigenous knowledge alongside science in the classroom,’ I feel obliged to point out that there is a rival explanation for the peacock’s train,” he writes—and then concludes this tangent a paragraph later by stating that “there is never anything remotely ‘valid’ about such mythology.”
Still, Ridley’s genuine love of birds—especially the really weird and beautiful ones—shines through as well. As he travels the world to observe the mating behavior of snipes and phalaropes, bowerbirds, and birds-of-paradise, he is clearly both delighted and fascinated with what he sees. Birds, Sex, and Beauty makes only the briefest gestures toward the urgency of bird conservation, but, in a way, it’s refreshing to read a book which focuses unabashedly on the sheer joy and mystery of birds instead of the terrifying list of threats they face. He even repeatedly dismisses humans as plain and boring in comparison to birds, writing, in my favorite line from the book, “mammals are prose; birds are poetry.”
I’ve been pondering how to best sum up my feelings about this book, which I was often ambivalent about. Essentially, if you’re considering picking up Birds, Sex, and Beauty because you have a general interest in fun, interesting books about our feathered neighbors, there might be others more worthy of your time. But, if you are specifically looking for an overview of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, the long debate over it among scientists, and how it has played out in numerous colorful, showy bird species, this book is a solid choice. One thing is certain: Birds, in all their flamboyance and wonder and, yes, poetry, have an ability to unite us all in admiration.
Rebecca Heisman is a freelance science writer based in Walla Walla, Washington. Her first book, Flight Paths (HarperCollins), explores the history and science of bird migration research. She has written previously for various professional ornithological organizations. Find her online at rebeccaheisman.com.
