Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The collection of these ornamental objects and materials is the result of male aesthetic preferences that have coevolved with female mating preferences. To please the females, the males have evolved a whole new class of behaviors and preferences of their own. In the process, they’ve made themselves into animal artists who vie for the attentions of their aesthetic patrons. As with any artist, their use of materials is far from random. As we have seen from the paleontological treasures collected by the Great Bowerbirds of Roebuck Bay, and the campground detritus collected by Satin Bowerbirds, the bower decorations are partly determined by what’s available in the immediate environment. But the role played by aesthetic choice is also very important, as demonstrated by pioneering work done by Jared Diamond in the early 1980s on the bower ornamentation among populations of the Vogelkop Bowerbird (Amblyornis inornata) in western Irian Jaya, the westernmost portion of the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea. Diamond discovered that males of the Fakfak and Kumawa Mountains build a straightforward maypole bower decorated exclusively with drab-colored materials like bamboo, bark, rocks, and snail shells. In contrast, the males of the nearby Arfak, Tamrau, and Wandammen Mountains, which are only 50–150 kilometers away, build an elaborate hut bower with a maypole at its center and an outer court that is decorated with colorful fruits, flowers, insect parts, fungi, and seedpods (color plate 19). These differences occur even though males in all five of these mountain populations have access to the exact same materials in their environments. There was even differentiation within immediately neighboring hut-bower-building populations. Arfak and Tamrau Mountain birds included white ornaments in their display, for example, whereas Wandammen Mountain birds did not. The birds are extremely picky about what they use. To further establish that bower decorations are the result of specific male preferences, Diamond did experiments in which he offered male Vogelkop Bowerbirds from the Wandammen Mountains—which build elaborate hut bowers with piles of diverse and colorful fruits, flowers, and other materials—a choice of different-colored poker chips. When males gathered the poker chips, they demonstrated significant preferences for specific colors, especially for blue, purple, orange, and red (in descending order of preference), and on their bower courts they grouped them with similarly colored flowers, fruits, or feathers. By marking the specific poker chips that made their ways into individual male bowers, Diamond was also able to establish that many of the poker chips were later stolen by other males to be incorporated into their bowers. The rate of theft reflected the same differential color preferences, with blue being stolen most often, red least often. In similar tests, males from the Kumawa Mountains—who build simpler maypole bowers with uniformly drab ornaments—rejected all colors of chips.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, Christ began to gather His disciples after His baptism and temptation, as related Mat. 4:18 and Jn. 1:35. But the disciples gathered around Him, principally on account of His miracles: thus it is written (Lk. 5:4) that He called Peter when “he was astonished at” the miracle which He had worked in “the draught of fishes.” Therefore it seems that He worked other miracles before that of the marriage feast. On the contrary, It is written (Jn. 2:11): “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee.” I answer that, Christ worked miracles in order to confirm His doctrine, and in order to show forth His Divine power. Therefore, as to the first, it was unbecoming for Him to work miracles before He began to teach. And it was unfitting that He should begin to teach until He reached the perfect age, as we stated above, in speaking of His baptism ([4216]Q[39], A[3] ). But as to the second, it was right that He should so manifest His Godhead by working miracles that men should believe in the reality of His manhood. And, consequently, as Chrysostom says (Hom. xxi in Joan.), “it was fitting that He should not begin to work wonders from His early years: for men would have deemed the Incarnation to be imaginary and would have crucified Him before the proper time.” Reply to Objection 1: As Chrysostom says (Hom. xvii in Joan.), in regard to the saying of John the Baptist, “‘That He may be made manifest in Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water,’ it is clear that the wonders which some pretend to have been worked by Christ in His childhood are untrue and fictitious. For had Christ worked miracles from His early years, John would by no means have been unacquainted with Him, nor would the rest of the people have stood in need of a teacher to point Him out to them.” Reply to Objection 2: What the Divine power achieved in Christ was in proportion to the needs of the salvation of mankind, the achievement of which was the purpose of His taking flesh. Consequently He so worked miracles by the Divine power as not to prejudice our belief in the reality of His flesh. Reply to Objection 3: The disciples were to be commended precisely because they followed Christ “without having seen Him work any miracles,” as Gregory says in a homily (Hom. v in Evang.). And, as Chrysostom says (Hom. xxiii in Joan.), “the need for working miracles arose then, especially when the disciples were already gathered around and attached to Him, and attentive to what was going on around them. Hence it is added: ‘And His disciples believed in Him,’” not because they then believed in Him for the first time, but because then “they believed with greater discernment and perfection.” Or they are called “disciples” because “they were to be disciples later on,” as Augustine observes (De Consensu Evang. ii).

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Without any natural impetus to use the example of prostitution, it came to mind as the coerced sin par excellence. The problem of evil was a challenge to Christian theodicy, but Basil’s God was intuitively just, and he would spare the innocent. Basil simply assumed that a prostitute was a slave, sold to a pimp. She was in sin as a result, but forgiven by God. In contrast, the honorable woman had agency in her sexual immorality, and as a result her actions were damnable. Basil’s notion that some prostitutes were condemned to sexual sin through coercion was by no means an incidental or passing thought. In another sermon, Basil explicitly contrasted two prostitutes. Some sins, he said, were “involuntary,” others from a “wicked disposition.” Here we see fully articulated the stark difference between voluntary sin and coerced sin. “One prostitute has been sold to the pimp and is in evil because of necessity, for she must provide her body for the work of her wicked master. But there is another who gives herself to sin voluntarily, because of pleasure.” In a more systematic context—one of his canonical letters—Basil carried his thought to its logical conclusion. “Sexual violations that occur through necessity are to be without blame.” Basil’s canon represents a monumental breakdown of the traditional social and mental barriers that had insulated the church from the need to think about the material realities behind sin. Here is a not insignificant expansion of human consciousness. Basil cut through the curtain that had for centuries blocked the need to think about the moral capacity of society’s most vulnerable.74 We might fruitfully contrast the sermon of Basil with the novel of Achilles Tatius. Achilles is aware of the ineffable strings of fate that pull human action. He walks us to the precipice and, at least for dramatic effect, asks us to contemplate the mysterious dispensation that could make Leucippe free and the prostitute an effigy of social death. But having stared at the abyss, he retreats, and takes solace in the order of a world that does allow beauty, pleasure, and existential fullness for some. Basil ponders this same mysterious dispensation, but with a conviction of its profound injustice and a confident hope for a final redemption in which all moral creatures will receive their due. The radicalism of Basil’s discovery is attributable to the stark collision between an ideology of free will and an earnest form of nascent social leadership. It is no accident that Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, has left the very earliest extant attack on slavery; for Gregory, slavery was an institution unjust to its very foundations, a violation of basic human rationality and moral autonomy. The takeover of society by the church opened a brief window for such radically creative social thought.75

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Fifteen years later, I had the pleasure to visit Brett Benz, then a University of Kansas undergraduate student, at his field site near the village of Herowana in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea where he was studying the MacGregor’s Bowerbird (Amblyornis macgregoriae), which builds a single-maypole bower. The maypole bowers of MacGregor’s Bowerbird are situated high up on ridges that descend sharply under the dense forest canopy. The male decorates his court and bower with a remarkably diverse set of ornaments that includes fruits of various colors, a brownish fungus, and tiny, extraordinarily brilliant, iridescent fragments of blue Entimus weevils. Brett had recorded video of a male returning to his bower with a living blue weevil. The male brutally pulled apart the writhing beetle on the court floor and carefully placed pieces of it in his bower arrangement. Stepping back after every such placement, he regarded each decorative possibility with a little cock of his head, like a fussy florist checking on the arrangement he was creating. Perhaps the most curious ornaments of all were the numerous stringy, threadlike blackish clumps hanging near the tips of various horizontal sticks in the bower structure itself, which turned out to be caterpillar frass—or droppings. The list of found ornaments in the collages assembled by this species was eclectic in the extreme. Like other Amblyornis maypole builders, the male MacGregor’s Bowerbird is mostly drab brown like the female, but unlike other Amblyornis the MacGregor’s male has a long, erectable crest of deep umber-orange feathers. During the courtship display, the male and the female stand on opposite sides of the circular runway, with their view of each other obscured by the maypole between them. Peering around the runway at the object of his desire, the male suddenly erects his brilliant orange crest feathers and flashes them at her, then quickly reverses course and peers at her around the opposite side of the maypole, and he continues to engage in a rapid succession of alternating glimpses in what is essentially an elaborate game of peekaboo. Sometimes the male makes a running dash toward her around his runway. If he approaches her too aggressively, however, she can scuttle to the side, keeping the maypole between her and her overeager prospective mate—or fly away. — There are several unique features of male bowerbird courtship behavior that require specific evolutionary explanation: the existence of the bower; the radical diversity of its architecture, which I’ve only begun to hint at in these brief examples; and the wildly eclectic nature of the items that the males gather to decorate the courtyards of their bowers. How did these extraordinary structures and behaviors come into being, and why? We must look to their evolutionary origins to find out.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xliv. 13) Freely, stedfastly, truly. For how could what our Lord did, be done by any other than God, or by disciples even, except when their Lord dwelt in them? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lviii. 3.) So then because speaking the truth he was in nothing confounded, when they should most have admired, they condemned him: Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us? AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xliv. 14) What meaneth altogether? That he was quite blind. Yet He who opened his eyes, also saves him altogether. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lviii. 3) Or, altogether, that is to say, from thy birth thou art in sins. They reproach his blindness, and pronounce his sins to be the cause of it; most unreasonably. So long as they expected him to deny the miracle, they were willing to believe him, but now they cast him out. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xliv. 14) It was they themselves who had made him teacher; themselves, who had asked him so many questions; and now they ungratefully cast him out for teaching. BEDE. It is commonly the way with great persons to disdain learning any thing from their inferiors. 9:35–4135. Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when he had found him, he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? 36. He answered and said, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? 37. And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee. 38. And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him. 39. And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind. 40. And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also? 41. Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see: therefore your sin remaineth.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  There is no landscape more fascinating to the baby than the mother’s face. There is no more exciting image to the child than the frame that includes Mom and Dad kissing, fighting, conferring, frowning, crying, yelling, or hugging in the adjoining room. These thousand and one images are internalized and they form the template for the child’s view of how men and women treat each other, how parents and children communicate, how brothers and sisters get along. From day one, children watch their parents and absorb the minutiae of human interaction. They observe their parents as private persons (when the adult thinks no one is paying attention) and as public persons onstage outside the home. They listen carefully to what the parents say (although they often pretend not to hear) and they ponder what the parents fail to say. No scientist ever looked through a microscope more intently than the average child who observes her family day in and night out. And they make judgments from early on. Children as young as four years old tell me, “I want to be a daddy like my dad” or “I won’t be a mommy like my mommy.” They have powerful feelings of love, hate, envy, admiration, pity, respect, and disdain. This is the theater of our lives—our first and most important school for learning about ourselves and all others. From this we extrapolate the interactions of human society. The images of each family are imprinted on each child’s heart and mind, becoming the inner theater that shapes expectations, hopes, and fears. But over and beyond the child’s view of mother and father as individuals is the child’s view of the relationship between them—the nature of the relationship as a couple. Our scholarly literature is full of mother–child and, more recently, father–child experiments, but as every child could tell the professors, the child sees her parents as a twosome. She is intensely and passionately aware of their interaction. What could be more important or more enthralling? These complex images of parental interaction are central to the family theater and are of lasting importance to children of divorce and to children from intact families. All the young people in the intact families described the relationship between their parents as if they had followed them around day and night. They described their parents’ laughter, their teasing, how they knew how to push each other’s buttons and how they comforted one another. They even speculated in detail about their parents’ sex life. They told me whether Dad kissed Mom when he returned home or whether he pinched her bottom or whether the parents were reserved. Others wondered what their parents had in common or why they stayed married. Along with these observations, they made moral judgments and they reached conclusions that had direct implications for their future lives.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  15. “And, indeed, the knowledge and use of so salutary a science, which flows from the fertilizing founts of the sacred writings, the sovereign Pontiffs, the holy Fathers and the councils, must always be of the greatest assistance to the Church, whether with the view of really and soundly understanding and interpreting the Scriptures, or more safely and to better purpose reading and explaining the Fathers, or for exposing and refuting the various errors and heresies; and in these late days, when those dangerous times described by the Apostle are already upon us, when the blasphemers, the proud, and the seducers go from bad to worse, erring themselves and causing others to err, there is surely a very great need of confirming the dogmas of Catholic faith and confuting heresies.” 16. Although these words seem to bear reference solely to Scholastic theology, nevertheless they may plainly be accepted as equally true of philosophy and its praises. For, the noble endowments which make the Scholastic theology so formidable to the enemies of truth-to wit, as the same Pontiff adds, “that ready and close coherence of cause and effect, that order and array as of a disciplined army in battle, those clear definitions and distinctions, that strength of argument and those keen discussions, by which light is distinguished from darkness, the true from the false, expose and strip naked, as it were, the falsehoods of heretics wrapped around by a cloud of subterfuges and fallacies”—those noble and admirable endowments, We say, are only to be found in a right use of that philosophy which the Scholastic teachers have been accustomed carefully and prudently to make use of even in theological disputations. Moreover, since it is the proper and special office of the Scholastic theologians to bind together by the fastest chain human and divine science, surely the theology in which they excelled would not have gained such honor and commendation among men if they had made use of a lame and imperfect or vain philosophy.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. ii. 49.) A question of discrepancy is raised upon this, that Mark says the Lord was in the house when the woman came praying for her daughter. Indeed Matthew might have been understood to have omitted mention of the house, and yet to have been relating the same event; but when he says, that the disciples suggested to the Lord, Send her away, for she crieth after us, he seems to indicate clearly that the woman raised her voice in supplication, in following the Lord who was walking. We must understand then, that, as Mark writes, she entered in where Jesus was, that is, as he had noticed above, in the house; then, that as Matthew writes. He answered her not a word, and during this silence of both sides, Jesus left the house; and then the rest follows without any discordance. CHRYSOSTOM. I judge that the disciples were sorry for the woman’s affliction, yet dared not say ‘Grant her this mercy,’ but only Send her away, as we, when we would persuade any one, oftentimes say the very contrary to what we wish. He answered and said, I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. JEROME. He says that He is not sent to the Gentiles, but that He is sent first to Israel, so that when they would not receive the Gospel, the passing over to the Gentiles might have just cause. REMIGIUS. In this way also He was sent specially to the Jews, because He taught them by His bodily presence. JEROME. And He adds of the house of Israel, with this design, that we might rightly interpret by this place that other parable concerning the stray sheep. CHRYSOSTOM. But when the woman saw that the Apostles had no power, she became bold with commendable boldness; for before she had not dared to come before His sight; but, as it is said, She crieth after us. But when it seemed that she must now retire without being relieved, she came nearer, But she came and worshipped him. JEROME. Note how perseveringly this Chananæan woman calls Him first Son of David, then Lord, and lastly came and worshipped him, as God. CHRYSOSTOM. And therefore she said not Ask, or Pray God for me, but Lord, help me. But the more the woman urged her petition, the more He strengthened His denial; for He calls the Jews now not sheep but sons, and the Gentiles dogs; He answered and said unto her, It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and give it to dogs. GLOSS. (ap. Anselm.) The Jews were born sons, and brought up by the Law in the worship of one God. The bread is the Gospel, its miracles and other things which pertain to our salvation. It is not then meet that these should be taken from the children and given to the Gentiles, who are dogs, till the Jews refuse them.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Although tackling two subjects as complex and controversial as the evolution of beauty and the origins of humankind in one volume was an intellectually daring feat, Descent is generally considered a difficult, or even flawed, work. By building his argument so slowly and incrementally, writing in such dry, discursive prose, and citing so many learned authorities in support of the ideas he was advancing, Darwin might have thought he could draw any reasonable reader to accept the inevitability of his radical conclusions. But his rhetorical tactics failed, and in the end Descent was criticized by both creationist opponents of the very concept of evolution and fellow scientists who accepted natural selection but were adamantly opposed to sexual selection. To this day, Descent has never had the same intellectual impact as Origin. — The most notable and revolutionary feature of Darwin’s theory of mate choice is that it was explicitly aesthetic. He described the evolutionary origin of beauty in nature as a consequence of the fact that animals had evolved to be beautiful to themselves. What was so radical about this idea was that it positioned organisms—especially female organisms—as active agents in the evolution of their own species. Unlike natural selection, which emerges from external forces in nature, such as competition, predation, climate, and geography, acting on the organism, sexual selection is a potentially independent, self-directed process in which the organisms themselves (mostly female) were in charge. Darwin described females as having a “taste for the beautiful” and an “aesthetic faculty.” He described males as trying to “charm” their mates: With the great majority of animals…the taste for the beautiful is confined to the attractions of the opposite sex.* The sweet strains poured forth by many male birds during the season of love are certainly admired by the females, of which fact evidence will hereafter be given. If female birds had been incapable of appreciating the beautiful colours, the ornaments, and voices of their male partners, all the labour and anxiety by the latter in displaying their charms before the females would have been thrown away; and this is impossible to admit… On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have…[Birds] charm the female by vocal and instrumental music of the most varied kinds.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  This presentation employs an eclectic armory of sources: law and literature, scientific treatises and moralizing tracts, even a glance at the ubiquitous erotic art of the Roman Empire. The mélange is deliberate, for it helps us resist the temptation to ascribe supremacy to any one witness or class of witnesses. There will be no doubting, however, which type of informant is accorded a measure of favoritism: the novelist. The history of the ancient novel is effectively coterminous with the four centuries of Roman Empire. Rarely in history are great genres of literature born, and when they are, it surely signals a significant cultural juncture. The novels are tales of eros; they are dedicated to the power of eros and celebrate its divine power. A heady synthesis of comedy, love poetry, travel literature, and philosophy, the novels are the quintessential cultural expression of a civilization with a mature tradition of speculation on human sexual experience. At the same time, the novels are breathtakingly unique creations whose narrative intricacy allowed their authors to explore, slowly and with a new sympathy, the contours of the soul experiencing eros. On the whole, the romances strike a tone of wry conservatism. These stories are the product of a confident and assertive aristocracy, capable of believing that the world could be redeemed through social reproduction. But it is too much to declare the novels simple propaganda. Their authors are too alert to the unruly power of eros, too eager to portray the sinuous routes to conjugal love to be trying to put over something as bland as a point. In particular, Chapter 1 lets Leucippe and Clitophon, a romance written in the second century by an author named Achilles Tatius, act as a guide as we trek across the landscape of imperial sexual culture. Among the surviving romances, Leucippe and Clitophon is probably the most sensational and certainly the most canny. The whole work is marked by a sly, if not subversive, sympathy for the inevitable disjuncture between the inarticulate mysteries of human sexuality and the artificial constraints of any erotic code. Achilles Tatius makes an ideal tour guide, one who knows all the traditional details but gleefully spills unauthorized truths.8

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Another avenue builder, the Great Bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis), has a wide distribution in dry open woodlands across the northern third of the Australian continent. In most Great Bowerbird populations, males collect and display light-colored pebbles, bones, and snail shells for their bowers. But the males of one population of Great Bowerbirds are particularly original in their choice of decorations, as I had occasion to observe in 2010, when I visited the Broome Bird Observatory in the northwestern corner of Australia. This preserve sits on the shores of Roebuck Bay, which is lined by steep, five- to twenty-meter-high cliffs of red clay and stratified rocks. About half a kilometer from the ocean cliff face, I observed a Great Bowerbird avenue bower with a surrounding courtyard decorated at both front and back with a vast pile of bleached, brilliantly white fossil clam shells (color plate 18). This bird’s bower was a virtual paleontological museum, displaying fascinating examples of the earth’s extinct biodiversity to attract prospective mates. Quite literally, this male’s territorial calls meant “Do you want to come over and see my fossil collection?” The shells were so distinct in shape and color that it was easy to identify their source. At certain places along the red cliffs that tower over the bay, a brilliantly white layer of material about a foot thick is exposed. Closer inspection revealed that this was a layer of white fossil bivalves that had been deposited in abundance during an earlier epoch in the geological history of this corner of the ancient continent. As a museum curator myself, I felt a certain affinity with this bowerbird’s paleontological passion. The second major architectural style made by bowerbirds is the maypole bower, which consists of a pile of horizontal sticks placed around a central support, usually a sapling or a small tree. The stack of brown sticks is cone shaped, broadest at the base, and narrowing at the top to form a structure that is like a bottlebrush, or a bizarre, minimalist, postmodern Christmas tree. At the base of the maypole, the male clears a circular path, or runway, which allows the male and the female to run a rapid circuit around the maypole during the courtship maneuvers. The court, which is located outside this circular runway, is decorated with materials the male has gathered, which can include flowers, fruits, beetle and butterfly parts, and even fungus. Some bowerbird species also adorn the twigs and branches of their Christmas-tree-like structure with decorative materials, such as regurgitated fruit pulp. (Okay, so maybe that’s not so much like a Christmas tree.)

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In manakins, female mate choices have fundamentally reshaped the nature of an all-male world they rarely visit in order to advance both female sexual fancy and freedom of choice. The result has been the evolution of the lek itself and of the numerous and astonishing variations in coordinated male display found in so many species. Nearly 150 years after The Descent of Man, we must wonder whether Darwin’s statement—“Birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man”—went far enough. If we measure the aesthetic accomplishment of an individual or a species in terms of the share of energy and investment dedicated to aesthetic expression, then manakins far exceed humans. All manakin males—half of the species—expend most of their time and energies in the rehearsal, perfection, and performance of a set of highly choreographed song and dance routines, in duet, group, and solo forms. By Darwin’s criteria, the manakins and bowerbirds beat humans by far! [image file=image_rsrc3NX.jpg] CHAPTER 8Human Beauty Happens TooCharles Darwin’s Descent of Man is basically a long book about the evolution of humans, with a few chapters about birds and other animals. Darwin included the birds (and other animals) in order to better support his hypothesis that sexual selection played a critical role in human evolution. This book takes a similar approach, but with the ratio of people to birds reversed. The mixed approach is as vital and productive today as it was then. By applying what we’ve learned about mate choice through our examination of the evolution of birds, we can gain a much fuller understanding of its role in shaping the appearance and the sexual behavior of our own species. The forces we’ve witnessed in birds—Beauty Happens, sexual conflict, and aesthetic remodeling—play out in humans and their primate ancestors, too, and the chapters that follow will speculate as to how. I say “speculate,” because human aesthetic evolution is a new science and most of the theories I offer here will need to be tested and analyzed with data from comparative studies and sociological investigations. But as we’ve seen with the birds, aesthetic evolution has great explanatory power, and what’s more, it rescues us from the tedious and limiting adaptationist insistence on the ubiquitous power of natural selection. And indeed, the study of human mate choice is currently dominated by such insistence, in the form of a field called evolutionary psychology. Contemporary evolutionary psychology has a profound, constitutive, often fanatical commitment to the universal efficacy of adaptation by natural selection. The application of the concept of adaptation to human biology is the organizing principle of the field. Evolutionary psychologists view human sexual ornaments and behavior as a cornucopia of honest advertisements and adaptive strategies. There is never any doubt what the conclusion of any evolutionary psychology study will be. The only question is how far the study will have to go to get there.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image "The obligate coordinated display of a group of male Blue Manakins for a visiting female (perched at right). As the male closest to the female leaps up and flutters back down the branch, the perched males sidle up the branch toward the female. The cycle is repeated dozens or even hundreds of times." file=image_rsrc3NV.jpg] The obligate coordinated display of a group of male Blue Manakins for a visiting female (perched at right). As the male closest to the female leaps up and flutters back down the branch, the perched males sidle up the branch toward the female. The cycle is repeated dozens or even hundreds of times. Considerable skill and coordination are involved in putting on these performances. Because the females are extremely discerning, their preferences select for males who have been in male-male social relationships that have lasted long enough to have allowed them plenty of time to practice diligently and iron out any kinks in their performances. Apparently, it can take years of practice to achieve vocal coordination between males that is good enough to attract mates. The ornithologists Jill Trainer and David McDonald have shown that the timing of the vocal coordination in the Toleedo…Toleedo…duet sung by male pairs of Long-tailed Manakins greatly influences their chances at sexual success. This cooperative mode of display behavior has reorganized the entire breeding system of the Chiroxiphia manakins, resulting in a distinctly new form of lek. Chiroxiphia males do not defend individual territories, as other manakins do. Rather, each display territory is controlled by a team of males. The team consists of a dominant, alpha male who shares the territory with a subordinate beta—or in the case of Chiroxiphia caudata, with beta, gamma, and even epsilon males—all of them aspiring one day to succeed him as alpha male. The male partnerships within these shared territories are long-lasting and established over the course of years of interactions. But the road to this kind of partnership is filled with challenges for the wannabe alphas. The young males must compete with each other as each of them strives to become an established beta male or alpha territory holder. And before they can even enter the competition, they must wait out the four-year period it takes for them to achieve mature adult plumage. At first, the young males look like green females, and each year they molt into a successively more male-like plumage. During this period, the subadult males consort with various groups and participate in rudimentary displays. Once they achieve adult plumage, males typically spend several more years displaying as floaters, trying to win the approval of an alpha male whom they can partner with. During this apprenticeship time they continue to work on improving the temporal coordination of their duetting songs and displays.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  If this man had not maintained peace in the world, and revived the economy of the empire, his personal fortunes and misfortunes would have moved me less. One can never give enough time to the absorbing study of relationships between texts. The poem on the hunting trophy consecrated by Hadrian at Thespiae to the God of Love and to the Uranian Venus, "on the hills of Helicon, beside Narcissus" spring", can be dated as of the autumn of the year 124; at about that same time the emperor passed through Mantinea, where, according to Pausanius, he had the tomb of Epaminondas rebuilt, and wrote a poem to be inscribed upon it. The Mantinean inscription is now lost, but Hadrian's act of homage is to be fully understood, perhaps, only if we view it in relation to a passage of Plutarch's Morals which tells us that Epaminondas was buried in that place between two young friends struck down at his side. If for date of the meeting of the emperor and Antinous we accept the stay in Asia Minor of 123-124, which is in any case the most plausible date and the best supported by iconographical evidence, these two poems then would form a part of what might be called the Antinous cycle; both are inspired by that same Greece of heroic lovers which Arrian evoked later on, after the death of the favorite, when he compared the youth to Patroclus. A certain number of persons whose portraits one would wish to develop: Plotina, Sabina, Arrian, Suetonius. But Hadrian could see them only in part, from the point of view at which he was standing. Antinous himself has to be presented by refraction, through the emperor's memories, that is to say, in passionately meticulous detail, not devoid of a few errors. All that can be said of the temperament of Antinous is inscribed in any one of his likenesses. "Eager and impassionated tenderness, sullen effeminacy": Shelley, with a poet's admirable candor, says the essential in six words, while most of the nineteenth-century art critics and historians could only expatiate upon the subject with righteous declamation, or else idealize about it, vaguely and hypocritically. We are rich in portraits of Antinous; they range in quality from the mediocre to the incomparable. Despite variations due to the skill of the respective sculptors or to the age of the model, or to differences between portraits made from life and those executed to commemorate the youth after death, all are striking and deeply moving because of the incredible realism of the face, always immediately recognizable and nevertheless so diversely interpreted, and because they are examples, unique in classical antiquity, of survival and repetition in stone of a countenance which was neither that of a statesman nor of a philosopher, but simply of one who was loved.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The controversial conversation piece in which Aldo appeared with the as yet unmartyred St Sebastian hung alongside. Sebastian was a boy of tedious, waxen beauty, with a little loincloth about to tumble down. They had been cleverly posed against a projected backdrop taken from some Tuscan master, but for all the quattrocento piquancy of their gestures they reminded me of nothing so much as those queeny fashion spreads in Tatler and Uomo Vogue. The impression was reinforced by a surge of Trouble for Men across my nostrils and the appearance at biceps level of the luminous pink spectacles of Guy Parvis. For a second I thought I might actually be caught up in one of his Alternative Image TV programmes, and prepared to sidestep the cameras as they zoomed in on Sebastian’s Gillette-smooth profile. But it seemed he was there in a private capacity. I distanced myself even as I was perversely drawn to stare at him, keen to pick up any absurd and memorable remarks. I finished my glass of wine and downed most of another while I looked at the handsome bearded St Laurence with his dinky little gridiron, and the St Stephen who crouched appealingly in a shaft of light while above him the shadowy form of an immense black whom I would have liked to meet held a stone aloft. St Peter was Ashley, who worked out at the Corry, but he was not seen to best advantage upside-down. The bell clacked frequently now and we early browsers became subsumed into the crowd of callers, who greeted each other, kissed, caught up on their news, walked backwards into other guests without apologising and generally, as if they were in a private house where such curiosity would have been unseemly, ignored the pictures. Those who had equipped themselves with a price list were forced into the crude necessity of asking the drinkers to move so as to get some distance on the martyrs or to squinny at the numbered labels. I took another drink and moved downstairs. Here there was a series of life-size nudes, in a sculptural Whitehaven style—martyrs only to the bench and the Nautilus machine—and a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more—a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife. The photographs were balletic and metaphorical, with a good deal of emphasis on the slim gilt soul aspect and a number of images, in Staines’s most typical style, crossed and half-obscured by the shadows of prison bars.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In a culture where foundations prefer quick results and time- limited programs, the Zellerbach Family Fund has had the wisdom and courage to recognize the matchless contribution of long-term follow- up studies of children.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It could be proved, if need were, that these four men had plotted my death; it was to their interest, in any case, to do so. Every transition from one reign to another involved its operations of mopping up; he had taken this task upon himself in order to leave my hands clean. If public opinion demanded a victim, nothing was simpler than to deprive him of his post of Praetorian prefect. He had envisaged such a measure; he was advising me to take it. And if more were needed to conciliate the Senate, he would approve my going as far as relegation to the provinces, or exile. Attianus had been the guardian from whom money could be wheedled, the counselor of my difficult days, the faithful agent; but this was the first time that I had ever looked attentively at that face with its carefully shaven jowls, at those crippled hands tranquilly clasped over the handle of his ebony cane. I knew well enough the different elements of his life as a prosperous citizen: his wife, whom he loved, and whose health was frail; his married daughters and their children, for whom he was modest but tenacious in his ambitions, as he had been for himself; his love of choice dishes; his decided taste for Greek cameos and for young dancing girls. He had given me precedence over all these things: for thirty years his first care had been to protect me, and next to serve me. To me, who had not yet given first place to anything except to ideas or projects, or at the most to a future image of myself, this simple devotion of man to man seemed prodigious and unfathomable. No one is worthy of it, and I am still unable to account for it. I followed his counsel: he lost his post. His faint smile showed me that he expected to be taken at his word. He knew well that no untimely solicitude toward an old friend would ever keep me from adopting the more prudent course; this subtle politician would not have wished me otherwise. Let us not exaggerate the extent of his disgrace: after some months of eclipse, I succeeded in having him admitted to the Senate. It was the greatest honor that I could offer to this man of equestrian rank. He lived to enjoy the easy old age of a wealthy Roman knight, much sought after for his perfect knowledge of families and public affairs; I have often been his guest at his villa in the Alban Hills.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In order to calm my fears I used to say to myself that the empire could find worse masters; Servianus after all was not without qualities; even the dull Fuscus would one day perhaps be worthy to reign. But all the energy which I had left was summoned to refuse this lie, and I wished to live if only to crush that viper. On coming back to Rome I saw much of Lucius again. In former days I had made commitments to him which ordinarily one hardly troubles to fulfill, but which I had kept. It is not true, however, that I had promised him the imperial purple; such things are not done. But for nearly fifteen years I had paid his debts, hushed up his scandals, and answered his letters without delay; delightful letters they were, but they always ended with requests for money for himself, or for advancement for his friends. He was too much mingled with my life for me to exclude him from it had I wished to do so, but I wished nothing of the sort. His conversation was brilliant: this young man whom people judged superficial had read more, and more intelligently, than the writers who make such works their profession. In everything his taste was exquisite, whether for people, objects, manners, or the most exact fashion of scanning a line of Greek verse. In the Senate, where he was considered able, he had made a reputation as an orator: his speeches were at the same time terse and ornate, and served immediately upon utterance as models for the professors of eloquence. I had had him named praetor, and then consul: he had fulfilled these functions well. Some years earlier I had arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of Nigrinus, one of the consular conspirators executed at the beginning of my reign; that union became the emblem of my policy of conciliation. It was but moderately successful: the young woman complained of being neglected, but she had three children by him, one of whom was a son. To her almost continual repining he would reply with frigid politeness that one marries for one's family's sake and not for oneself, and that so weighty a contract ill affords with the carefree play of love. His complicated system demanded mistresses for display and willing slaves for sensuous delights. He was killing himself in pursuit of pleasure, but was doing so like an artist who destroys himself in completing a masterpiece: it is not for me to reproach him in that.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Before the service began, I thought about all the time I had spent with Walter after he got out. Then the choir sang, and the preacher gave a rousing sermon. He spoke about Walter being pulled away from his family in the prime of his life by lies and bigotry. I told the congregation that Walter had become like a brother to me, that he was brave to trust his life to someone who was as young as I was then. I explained that we all owed Walter something because he had been threatened and terrorized, wrongly accused and wrongly condemned, but he never gave up. He survived the humiliation of his trial and the charges against him. He survived a guilty verdict, death row, and the wrongful condemnation of an entire state. While he did not survive without injury or trauma, he came out with his dignity. I told people that Walter had overcome what fear, ignorance, and bigotry had done to him. He had stood strong in the face of injustice, and his exonerated witness might just make the rest of us a little safer, slightly more protected from the abuse of power and the false accusations that had almost killed him. I suggested to his friends and family that Walter’s strength, resistance, and perseverance were a triumph worth celebrating, an accomplishment to be remembered. I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. I told the congregation that Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 4: Further, “What things soever were written,” especially of Christ, “were written for our learning,” according to Rom. 15:4. But some of the things written in the Gospels touching Christ’s burial in no wise seem to pertain to our instruction—as that He was buried “in a garden . . .” in a tomb which was not His own, which was “new,” and “hewed out in a rock.” Therefore the manner of Christ’s burial was not becoming. On the contrary, It is written (Is. 11:10): “And His sepulchre shall be glorious.” I answer that, The manner of Christ’s burial is shown to be seemly in three respects. First, to confirm faith in His death and resurrection. Secondly, to commend the devotion of those who gave Him burial. Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i): “The Gospel mentions as praiseworthy the deed of those who received His body from the cross, and with due care and reverence wrapped it up and buried it.” Thirdly, as to the mystery whereby those are molded who “are buried together with Christ into death” (Rom. 6:4). Reply to Objection 1: With regard to Christ’s death, His patience and constancy in enduring death are commended, and all the more that His death was the more despicable: but in His honorable burial we can see the power of the dying Man, who, even in death, frustrated the intent of His murderers, and was buried with honor: and thereby is foreshadowed the devotion of the faithful who in the time to come were to serve the dead Christ. Reply to Objection 2: On that expression of the Evangelist (Jn. 19:40) that they buried Him “as the manner of the Jews is to bury,” Augustine says (Tract. in Joan. cxx): “He admonishes us that in offices of this kind which are rendered to the dead, the custom of each nation should be observed.” Now it was the custom of this people to anoint bodies with various spices in order the longer to preserve them from corruption [*Cf. Catena Aurea in Joan. xix]. Accordingly it is said in De Doctr. Christ. iii that “in all such things, it is not the use thereof, but the luxury of the user that is at fault”; and, farther on: “what in other persons is frequently criminal, in a divine or prophetic person is a sign of something great.” For myrrh and aloes by their bitterness denote penance, by which man keeps Christ within himself without the corruption of sin; while the odor of the ointments expresses good report.