The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe, with and Addition to the Theory of Sexual Selection and a Foreword by Desmond Morris

London: Jonathan Cape, 1968. First edition thus.

HUXLEY'S GROUNDBREAKING STUDY OF EVOLVED RITUALIZED BEHAVIOR IN SEXUAL SELECTION.

10.5x18.5 cm hardcover, black cloth binding, gilt title to spine, 97 pp, [2], 2 plates. Near fine in near fine dust jacket in protective mylar sleeve.

LAID IN: Retrospective review of the book in Nature 25 Sept 2014, pages 484-5. " JULIAN HUXLEY (1887–1975) was an architect of the mid-twentieth-century evolutionary synthesis that merged Darwin's ideas on natural selection with population genetics. Decades before that, however, he helped to pioneer the field of animal behavior with his groundbreaking work on avian ethology, the 1914 Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe. In it, he demonstrated how detailed observations of individual birds can prompt profound biological questions and sometimes reveal the outline of the answers. Huxley and his brother Trevenen spent two weeks watching the courtship of great crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus). They did so at a reservoir near the Hertfordshire town of Tring, now renowned as home to the matchless bird collections of the Natural History Museum. The result was a paper published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1914 and later, in slightly abbreviated form, as a pocket-sized book. By the month of the brothers' observations, the grebes had already paired. Nevertheless, male and female, whose plumages are virtually identical, engaged in striking behaviors such as the "cat attitude" and the "penguin dance", as Huxley colorfully labelled them. These he interpreted as necessary to bring the two birds into what he perceived as the emotional synchrony needed for coition, nest-building and egg-laying. To achieve this, some behaviors have undergone a gradual change from useful action to symbol to ritual. It was Huxley's landmark paper that identified this process of ritualization in animal behavior (he organized a Royal Society symposium to discuss it in 1965). Huxley also realized that ritualization extended to mammals, including people. With a sprinkling of references to Dante, Plato and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, he digresses to muse on how human courtship so often and so predictably proceeds from hand-holding to kissing to more. More formally, he realized that behaviors may be shaped by evolution."