In his Descent of Man, Darwin put forth his theories on sexual selection. Much of it dealt with attractiveness to possible mates, and the choice of the females of different species to mate or not to mate. But in his volume on orchids, On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862), he went further into exploring how the actual forms of species could adapt specifically for the purpose of the survival of their genetic line. John Ruskin, as an eminent art historian, disagreed, asserting that beauty could not have such base origins. Not that it was aesthetics in its modern sense that they were dealing with--it is looks. The look of things, as we all should know, affects its reception. And "lookism," a term coined at least once, by the New York Times, has deep roots in history. I am specifically concerned with form in flora and fauna and the facial characteristics of human beings, since physiognomy became a huge prospective science of the 19th-century, along with craniometry (it's similarly retrospectivally racist cousin).
