Darwin’s Descent of Man is largely devoted to sexual selection. His lengthy review of sexual selection in non-human animals prefaces his advocacy of sexual selection as the dominant force in the recent evolution of our species. His treatment of human nakedness begins by dismissing—more glibly than his modern followers find comfortable—the possibility that we lost our hair for utilitarian reasons. His faith in sexual selection is reinforced by the observation that in all races, however hairy or however hairless, the women tend to be less hairy than the men. Darwin believed that ancestral men
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