[Note #11] Reading the Brooks Menagerie: A Victorian Story of Sexual Selection

The choice of the animal heads for Brooks Hall can be traced directly to Chapter 18, “Secondary Sexual Characteristics of Mammals,” in Darwin’s 1871 book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.[1]

Darwin defined sexual selection as the reproductive advantage which certain animals gain over others of the same sex and species (p.243). Selection in mammals was for distinctive secondary sexual traits (dimorphism) such as body size, canines, horns, and tusks. Prominent on the Brooks Hall carvings, Darwin argued that these traits are the weapons used by males to compete with other males for female choice (p. 561). Illustrating female choice proved elusive (or less important?) to Victorian era artists. In addition, males were the default sex used to illustrate species in museums. According to one museum curator, a male was most ‘typical.’[2]

Anthropologist Linda Fedigan cautions that sex differences in behavior cannot be deduced from degrees of sexual dimorphism.[3] Katherine Ralls documented that females are larger than males in many more species of mammals than generally supposed.[4] Reading Darwinian sexual selection today must begin with a grasp of the gender and sex role biases of the Victorian era.[5]

From Professor Hantman

[1] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871, London: John Murray (Penguin Classics Edition 2004, New York).

[2] Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Nature by Design: Masculinity and Animal Display in Nineteenth Century America, p. 120, and Jonathan Smith, Picturing Sexual Selection, p. 89, both In Figuring it Out, Science, Gender, and Visual Culture, edited by Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2004.

[3] Linda Fedigan cited in Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, p. 341, New York: Routledge, 1989. [4] Katherine Ralls, 1976, Mammals in Which Females are Larger than Males. Quarterly Review of Biology 51: 245-276. [5] I am indebted to Dr. Fabien Knoll, ARAID Senior Researcher at the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel, Spain, for sharing his insight that an ‘all mammal’ cast on the Brooks Museum was highly unusual. I am also indebted to my colleague Dr. Mark Sicoli, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, for gently urging me to have another look at Darwin’s Descent of Man.