As a result, males in particular tend to develop characteristics designed to persuade females that they are the most desirable mates around a phenomenon known as sexual selection.

ECONOMIST: What is music for?

Sexual selection emphasises the development of characteristics that demonstrate in a way that cannot be faked just how fit that characteristic's possessor is to father (or mother) another individual's offspring.

ECONOMIST: Come up and see my etchings

Sexual selection acts even more directly.

ECONOMIST: Come up and see my etchings

And Endless Forms at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge, considers how Darwin's ideas penetrated the consciousness of the great artists of the era, inspiring visual representations of the struggle for existence, of natural attraction and sexual selection, and the origin and descent of man.

BBC: Friday 11 September: Darwin special