''THE sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick,'' Darwin confided to his son Francis some time before writing ''The Origin of Species.'' Darwin felt this cumbersome, apparently useless accouterment undermined his theory that all species' traits evolved via natural selection to help individuals survive. Not until he developed his corollary theory of sexual selection did he realize that such apparently nonfunctional characteristics evolved to win the mating game. Those peacocks with the most flamboyant tail feathers attracted more peahens and sired more young, passing on their genes for this outlandish ornament.
Like peacocks, women (and men) have evolved a host of ornaments. In ''The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body,'' the zoologist Desmond Morris gives us a guided tour of female body parts, often with Darwin's principle of sexual selection in mind. Many of these feminine trimmings, he reports, evolved at least in part to attract a mate. Morris starts with scalp hair, which grows much longer than that of all other primates. These tresses can signal health, age, status or affiliation in both sexes, but women more regularly use their locks for sex appeal. Moving downward to ears, eyes, mouth, neck, hands, breasts, belly and so on to feet, Morris explores the biology, evolution and functions of each feminine feature, illustrating his arguments with the customs of the ancient Egyptians, classical Greeks, modern Americans and many other peoples around the world.
Take a woman's lips. These puffy, everted organs are unique among primates, Morris tells us. But while men's lips become thinner in adulthood, more like those of monkeys and apes, women's remain pillowy and everted throughout the childbearing years, when they serve as sexual signals. During sexual arousal they become redder, engorged and sensitive, mimicking the genital labia.
Women throughout history have highlighted their lips for sexual purposes, from classical Greeks who applied lip colorings of dyes mixed with human saliva, sheep sweat and crocodile dung to contemporary Americans who pay surgeons to enlarge their lips by inserting synthetic material, freeze-dried skin or body fat.
Women's everted lips are a good example of neoteny, the extension of childlike characteristics into adulthood, an evolutionary process Morris returns to frequently throughout the book. Women have more neotenous physical traits than men do. For example, pound for pound the average adult woman has about twice as much body fat, an infantile trait, as the average man. Women also have higher, more childlike voices and smoother, more finely boned baby faces, traits that Morris maintains evolved to elicit protective responses in their male mates.
Morris brings not just his scientific curiosity to his subject, but also his sense of justice. Filming an American television series on the human sexes a few years ago, he became ''disturbed and angry . . . with the way women were being treated in many countries.'' So when he was asked to prepare a new edition of his 1985 book, ''Bodywatching,'' he decided to devote the work to the female. The result, ''The Naked Woman,'' incorporates only a small portion of the text from the original book.
He describes women's most dramatic maltreatment in his chapter on female genitals. The clitoris, he notes, is a bundle of some 8,000 nerve fibers, the most sensitive region of the female body. But today some 100 million women in more than 20 countries, largely in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, have suffered painful genital mutilation. In its most extreme form, a girl's outer labia, inner labia and clitoris are scraped or cut off. Her vaginal opening is sewn up with silk, catgut or thorns, leaving a minute passage for urine and menstrual blood. Then her legs are tied together to make sure scar tissue forms, permanently altering the genital region. Her husband will forcibly reopen her vulva, but if he travels, it may be sewn up again. These operations often cause severe infections, even death.
For all its heartfelt advocacy, ''The Naked Woman'' has its faults. Morris sometimes repeats old material, and he gets some facts wrong. For example, in discussing our long past as hunter-gatherers, he says, ''In ancient times, the great deity was always a woman.'' Although this is a popular belief, anthropologists have no hard evidence for it. For the most part, however, ''The Naked Woman'' lives up to the high standard Morris set for himself in many of his more than 30 previous books, including ''The Naked Ape.'' He champions the current data suggesting that women are by nature more fluent in speech than men, better at handling several tasks at once and more manually dexterous. In fact, after noting that most exceptional pianists are men, he writes, ''If a slightly smaller keyboard was made . . . female pianists would easily outplay their male counterparts.'' In an age when many educated people resist the voluminous data on the biological variations between the sexes, Morris's unapologetic description of myriad gender differences is refreshing.
Perhaps most important, Morris reiterates an anthropological tenet: for millions of years humankind lived in societies where women and men were regarded as different but largely equal. Today women in many cultures are gradually returning to their ancient human status. And in a time when some people question the concept of evolution, Morris's book gives an elegant view of nature's timeless evolutionary processes and one of its most sophisticated creations: woman.
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, is the author of ''Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.''
A couple of weeks ago, when the snow was at its deepest, I walked up the hill in the middle pasture after chores. By that time in the afternoon, I am often trudging through my thoughts, barely noticing anything around me. Part of the pleasure of chores is that they happen in the same light every day, though the hour changes as the days lengthen and contract. No matter what I’m doing, I am propelled outside by the falling light, which means that I’m often doing chores mid-paragraph. I imagine that the animals are mid-paragraph too, for we are all just going about our business together.
Coming back down the hill, plunging knee-deep through the snow, I stopped. There was the print of a bird’s wings. From their angle and size, I guessed it was a barn owl. I looked across the pasture and saw a squirrel’s track, which ended at the wing-print — no sign of a struggle, just an abrupt vanishing. Going up the hill, I had walked past these marks without even noticing them.
A week later, all the snow had melted, which left me thinking about a question of ephemerality. That wing-print was a solid fact, the remains of a bone-jarring collision between two animals. One life ended there, and another was extended, but the only trace is in my mind. If I had come down the hill in the fog of thought that surrounded me while I was doing the chores, I would never have seen the print of those powerful wings and they would have left no mark in me.
I have grown used to the idea that nearly everything around me in nature happens unobserved and unrecorded. A snowy winter sometimes retains a transcript, but even those are rare. The bills of animal mortality are almost completely invisible otherwise. Who thrives, who dies, there is no accounting at all, only the fact of thriving and dying.
That wing-print allowed me to glimpse the uncompromising discipline of nature. But it will stand in my mind as the model of an almost perfect ephemerality, a vision of life itself. The snow has melted away, taking with it the squirrel’s track and the arc of those wings and my own track up the hill and the burnished spots where the horses rolled in the snow.
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