ABSTRACT
Sexual selection adds an individual, idiosyncratic element to the operations of natural selection and, moreover, provides a different set of criteria for what counts as success or fitness in the evolutionary schema. Darwin introduces the notion of sexual selection in part to explain what he could not ascribe to natural selection: the emergence and stabilization of particular trends that have no real survival value per se. Darwin wants to link the question of sexual selection to two of the most momentous developments in human evolution: first, to the development of language; second, to the descent of the different races of man. Natural selection is rendered more intricate and complicated through the input of its two particular variants: artificial selection or domestic breeding and sexual selection. Sexual selection introduces a further modality of divergence in organic life that will have its ultimately incalculable effects on epistemology as much as on ontology.
