This post will look at some of the potential implications for evolutionary theory of two books for the general reader, both published fairly recently. These are The First Minds: Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness by Arthur Reber and Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us. If the central arguments of these two books are accepted and juxtaposed with each other, the implications for evolutionary theory are very deep.