email from
The
way nature is—the nature of flowers, the nature of birdsong and bird
plumages—implies that subjective experiences are fundamentally important in
biology. That the world looks the way it does and is the way it is because of
their vital importance as sources of selection in organic diversity, and as a
result we need to structure evolutionary biology to recognize the aesthetic,
recognize the subjective experience.
"...ducks are one of the few birds that still have a penis. It's a very
weird structure. It has an explosive erection, its erection mechanisms are
lymphatic instead of vascular, it's stored outside-in inside the cloaca and
comes flying out, and they can get very lengthy—up to 40 centimeters, which is
over a foot long on a duck that is itself not even a foot long. It's an
extraordinary piece of biology. What's going on in these ducks?
"In lots of ducks there's forced copulation. It's the equivalent of rape
in ducks. In species where there is a lot of forced copulation, females have
evolved or co-evolved complex vaginal morphologies that frustrate the
intromission or frustrate entry of the penis during forced copulation. For
example, the penis of ducks is counter-clockwise coiled and often has ridges or
even teeth-like structures on the outside. In this case, in these species, the
female has evolved a vagina that has dead end cul-de-sacs, so that if the penis
goes down the wrong direction it’ll get bottled up and doesn’t perceive to be
closer to the oviduct, or further up the oviduct and closer to ova. And then
above the cul-de-sacs, the duck vagina has clockwise coils, so there's
literally anti-screw devices that prevent intromission during forced
copulation."
DUCK SEX, AESTHETIC EVOLUTION, AND THE ORIGIN OF BEAUTY
A Conversation with Richard Prum
Edge Video
[1 hour]
RICHARD PRUM is an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University, where he is
the Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Yale
Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Best regards