Word: birdsongs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...proved to be genetically unnecessary, it still wouldn't be a total waste of energy. It is to sex, after all, that we owe most of the things we consider aesthetically appealing in nature. If it were not for sex, there would be no blossoms and no birdsong. A flower-filled meadow resounding with the dawn chorus of songbirds is actually a scene of frenzied sexual competition. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at University College London, has pointed out that everything extravagant about human life, from poetry to fast cars, is rooted in sexual one-upmanship...
...Birdsong, a brilliant, bleak earlier novel, also to some extent a romance, Faulks wrote of sappers tunneling under trenches in World War I, listening for opposing tunnelers, waiting to be blown up and buried under yards of mud. The new novel is not so bloody, but like Birdsong it evokes vividly the erosion of nerve worked by fear, hunger, illness and the dimming of peaceful life to an unconvincing, half-remembered fantasy...