Criticism
Joseph Jordania proposed that in explaining brilliant body colors, various morphological additions ("ornaments"), wide range of vocalizations and strange display behaviors ("antics") in animal species Darwin neglected a very important factor of natural selection – warning display (known also as aposematism). Warning display uses virtually the same arsenal of visual, audio, olfactory and behavioral features as sexual selection. According to the principle of aposematism, in order to avoid costly physical violence and to replace violence with the ritualized forms of display, many animal species use different forms of warning display: visual signals (contrastive body colors, eyespots, body ornaments, threat display and various postures to look bigger), audio signals (hissing, growling, group vocalizations), olfactory signals (producing strong body odors, particularly when excited or scared), behavioral signals (demonstratively slow walking, aggregation in large groups, aggressive display behavior against predators and conspecific competitors). According to Jordania, most of these warning displays were incorrectly attributed by the proponents of sexual selection to the forces of sexual selection.
Read more about this topic: Sexual Selection
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)