Darwinian Explanation Research Articles

Nakedness and Nudity: A Darwinian Explanation for Looking and Showing Behavior

The author has conducted investigations into the looking and showing behavior of animals and human beings. These investigations have been concerned particularly with the role of clothes and social nudism, body image or one's concept of his or her body, fantasy life, curiosity and dreams. In each investigation, strong differences between males and females have been noted. The most important determinant of extreme looking and showing behavior (called voyeurism and exhibitionism, in pathological cases) is the psychodynamics of the individual. Cultural conditions, however, seem to mediate the expression of this behavior. Thus, when the milieu is repressive, with overtones of severe sexual prohibitions, then pathological or rebellious exhibitionism and voyeurism appear to be manifested. The conclusion drawn from these investigations, based on consistent sexual differences and dominant male visual sexual curiosity, is that the explanation is biological in the Darwinian sense.

Morphologie générale Membres et ceintures des vertébrés tétrapodes: Critique morphotogique du transformisme

PROF. VIALLETON is the leader in France of the school of modern transformists who believe in the Darwinian explanation of the evolution of genera and species by the process of the natural selection of small variations, but consider that the larger groups have arisen by a more rapid process of profound mutation. To illustrate this doctrine he presents us with a handsome and very useful monograph on the limbs and girdles of the cheiropterygial Vertebrata. The descriptions given of the various bones and articulations are clearly written, and the numerous illustrations throughout the text are excellent. As a work of reference for students of osteology this monograph is invaluable.

Recent Papers on Darwinism

THE Fortnightly Review for March contains an admirable article, by Dr. A. Russel Wallace, on “The World of Life, as Visualised and Interpreted by Darwinism.” The veteran author argues with all his old vigour and eloquence in favour of the theory of the origin of species by natural selection, bringing out the facts of extensive and independent variation under natural conditions, emphasising the reality of the struggle for life, and insisting on the facts of adaptation as inexplicable under any other hypothesis than that of Darwin. He shows how the commonest of the popular objections to the theory “rests upon the strange belief that variation is a rare phenomenon, that favourable variations occur singly and at long intervals, and, therefore, can have no effect in producing any important change”—an idea which is entirely-at variance with the actual facts of nature. But while strenuously upholding the sufficiency of the Darwinian explanation of the phenomena of life within its own sphere, he still allows that “neither Darwinism nor any other theory in science or philosophy can give more than a secondary explanation of phenomena.”