I'm not even bothering with a real post.
Prehistoric social competition was not like a power struggle between craft Chinese eunuchs or horticulturally competitive nuns: it was a complex social game in which real males and real females played for real sexual stakes.
These three problems compound one another. They roam around like a gang, knocking the sense out of any innocent young theories that happen to stroll along.
Imagine the way our species was a hundred thousand years ago. From the outside, they would look like just another group of large primates foraging around Africa, living in small bands, using a few simple tools. Even their courtship looks uneventful: a male and a female just sit together, their eyes meet, and they breathe at each other in odd staccato rhythms for several hours, until they start kissing or one gives up and goes away.
Finally, any theory of human origins should be satisfying at a personal level… It should seem as compelling in our rare moments of personal lucidity as it is when we are mired in that mixture of caffeine, television, habit, and self-delusion that is modern society we call “ordinary consciousness.”
I have never managed to feel genuine desire for any museum model of an Australopithecine female, however realistically their sloping foreheads, thick waists, and furry buttocks have been rendered.
Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had written rather erotic poems about the evolution of flowers.
Psychology haunts biology with the specter of half-conscious mate choice shaping the otherwise blind course of evolution. This psychologizing of evolution was Darwin’s greatest heresy. It was one thing for a generalized Nature to replace God as the creative force. It was much more radical to replace and omniscient Creator with the pebble-sized brains of lower animals lusting after one another. Sexual selection was not only atheism, but indecent atheism.
Scientists still feel awkward teaching sexual selection to students, talking about it with journalists, and writing about it for the public. Science is not so different from popular culture in this respect. Just as there are very few good films that explicitly show sexual penetration, there have been very few good theories of human mental evolution that depict our ancestors as fully sexual beings capable of intelligent mate choice.
Imagine the headaches if natural selection worked that way. Organisms would select which environments exist, as well as environments selecting with organisms exist. Strange, unpredictable feedback loops would arise. Would the feedback loop between polar bears and Arctic tundra result in a tundra of Neptunian frigidity where bears have fur ten feet thick, or a tundra of Brazilian sultriness where bears run nude? Would migratory birds select for more convenient winds, lower gravity, and more intelligible constellations? Or just an ever-full moon that pleasingly resembles an egg?
In the space of a few pages, Huxley managed to confuse sexual selection with natural selection, and failed to distinguish natural selection due to competition between individuals and natural selection due to competition between species. He argued that sexual ornaments are immoral because they undermine the good of the species, and if they are immoral, they must not really be sexual ornaments at all, but threat displays, or signals to prevent breeding between species, or perhaps something else.
Introducing sexual selection is more than just… [listing] …some of the weirdest and more wonderful of nature’s phenomena. That I could achieve simply by presenting the standard catalog of sexual selection’s “greatest hits”: the peacock’s tail, the nightingale’s song, the bowerbird’s nest, the butterfly’s wing, the Irish elk’s antlers, the baboon’s rump, and the first three Led Zeppelin albums.
For example, anthropologist Laura Betzig showed that throughout American history, presidents tended to mate more polygynously than men of lower political status. (This may be little consolation to politicians of mediocre musical ability, since popular male musicians such as Bob Marley and Mick Jagger allegedly behaved even more polygynously than presidents.)
From the point of view of genes in any male body, the body itself is a sinking prison ship. Death comes to all bodies sooner or later. Even if a male devoted all his energy to surviving, by storing up huge fat reserves and hiding in an armored underground compound, statistics guarantee that an accident would sooner later kill him. This paranoid survivalist strategy is no way to spread one’s genes through a population. The only deliverance for a male’s genes is through an escape tube into a female body carrying a fertile egg. Genes can survive in the long term only by jumping ship into offspring.
If your choice of sexual partner is very good indeed, your genes may hitch a ride to evolutionary stardom on the genetic quality of your mate.
Once sexual choice seized upon the brain as a possible fitness indicator, the brain was helpless to resist. Any individuals who did not reveal their fitness through their courtship behavior were not chosen as sexual partners. Their small, efficient, ironclad, risk-aversive, mutation-proof brains died out with them. In their place evolved our sort of brain: huge, costly, vulnerable, revealing.
Fitness indicators are to ordinary adaptations what literary agents are to authors, or what advertisements are to products. Of course, they are adaptations in their own right, just as literary agents are people too, and just as advertisements are also products-the products of advertising firms. But fitness indicators work differently. They take long vacations. They are social and sales-oriented. They live in the semiotic space of symbolism and strategic deal-making, not in the gritty world of factory production.
The Alien films notwithstanding, there is no such thing as a super-organism that could survive and reproduce in every possible environment.
[But fitness is not a guarantee of reproductive success.] A highly fit organism that we expect to thrive may be hit by lightning, or rejected as a sexual partner through some kind of situation-comedy mix-up.
Biology students are often taught to make a very clear distinction between evolutionary fitness and physical fitness, to keep them separated by the social Atlantic that keeps professional athletes from mixing with scientists.
In science-fiction films and comic books, “mutations” are Faustian bargains that confer superhuman powers while damning their possessors to abnormal appearance and impaired sexual attractiveness. Spiderman was bitten by a “mutated” spider, and acquired wall-clinging powers but became alienated from his girlfriend. Monster Island apparently had high levels of mutagenic radiation, which is how Godzilla acquired his “atomic breath” that incinerates his enemies but keeps him single.
How could mate choice favor a costly, useless ornament over a cheaper, more beneficial ornament? (Why should a man give a woman a useless diamond engagement ring, when he could buy her a nice big potato, which she could at least eat?)
If you are a really unfit peacock, you are not forced to grow a huge tail that will kill you through exhaustion within a week; instead you can grow a drab little tail and hope for the best. Compared to sexual ornamentation that grows on the body, courtship behavior is even more flexible and condition-dependent. If you are a human feeling really ill, you do not have to go to the Ministry of Sound nightclub with your significant other and dance all night after taking lots of drugs. If you in poor aerobic condition you do not have to run the Olympic marathon and die of heatstroke. If you are not very bright you do not have to go to Stanford Business School and fail. Condition-dependence lets us choose our battles.
The wastefulness of courtship is what keeps it romantic. The wasteful dancing, the wasteful gift-giving, the wasteful conversation, the wasteful laughter, the wasteful foreplay, the wasteful adventures.
Male humpback whales waste their energies with half-hour-long, hundred-decibel songs that they repeat all day long during the breeding season. Male weaverbirds waste their time constructing ornamental nests. Male stag beetles waste the matter and energy from their food growing huge mandibles. Male elephant seals waste a thousand pounds of their fat per breeding season fighting other elephant seals. Male lions waste countless calories copulating thirty times a day with female lions before the females will conceive. Male humans waste their time and energy getting graduate degrees, writing books, playing sports, fighting other men, painting pictures, playing jazz, and founding religious cults.
Like most evolutionary psychologists, I find that argument weak for many reasons-for example, it fails to explain why other large-brained species such as dolphins, whales, and elephants did not invent paleontology or socialism.
Our brains are only 2 percent of our body weight, but they consume 15 percent of our oxygen intake, 25 percent of our metabolic energy, and 40 percent of our blood glucose.
Typically, males of most species like sex regardless of their fitness and attractiveness to the females, so they tend to treat female senses as security systems to be cracked.
[This theory was] just slightly better than Sigmund Freud’s metaphor of the mind as a hydraulic system of liquid libido, or John Locke’s metaphor of the mind as a blank slate.
This entertainment metaphor suggests that the human mind shares some features with the entertainment industry. The mind has to e open for business, with a clean, safe, welcoming interior. It needs good public access routes and good advertising. It must provide a world of stimulation, ideas, adventure, interaction, and novelty set apart from the ordinary world of tedium, toil, and threatening uncertainty. It must capture the right market niche, and respond to changing consumer tastes. The mind hides the appalling working conditions of its employees (the energy-hungry brain circuits) to provide attentive, smiling service for visitors. Like the future dystopian in H.G. Well’s Time Machine, the Eloi of leisured ideas appear on the surface of consciousness, while the Morlocks of cognitive effort are imprisoned underground.
Viewed from a military point of view, Hollywood is a failure. It hasn’t even managed to annex the San Fernando valley, or invade Santa Monica, or bomb Santa Barbara, or establish a secret alliance with Tijuana. Its standing army is just a few hundred studio security guards, and it has no navy or air force. Its people are undisciplined, van, soft, and prone to fantasy. They live on salad. They would be no match for the Spartans, the Mongols, or the British SAS.
Modern human culture is a vast, collaborative attempt to chart out this space of all possible stimulation, to discover how to tweak our brains in pleasurable ways.
Now consider what happens in modern courtship. We take our dates to restaurants where we pay professional chefs to cook them great food, or to dance clubs where professional musicians excite their auditory systems, or to films where professional actors entertain them with vicarious adventures. The chefs, musicians, and actors do not actually get to have sex with our dates. They just get paid. We get the sex if the date goes well.
The minds of our ancestors were relatively naked compared to ours. They did not spend twenty years in formal education ornamenting their memory with dead people’s ideas. They did not read daily newspapers so that they could recount human-interest stories. In courtship, they had to make up their ideas, stories, jokes, myths, songs, and philosophies as they went along. There was on masking a poor imagination with a good education, or a poor sense of rhythm with a good CD collection. Perhaps even more importantly for long-term relationships, there was no television to keep your sexual partner amused after the first blush of romance faded. If they were bored in the relationship, there was on vicarious entertainment to be had. They either had to put up with your boring old self, or find a new lover.
When you picture ancestral females facing predators, do not imagine Marilyn Monroe whimpering and cowering. Imagine Steffi Graf brandishing a torch in place of a tennis racket.
Recent surveys show that Japanese fathers are starting to play with their children for almost seven minutes a day.
Not a single ancestor of any living human was exclusively homosexual.
Even male chimpanzees hold each other’s penises for comfort when they are frightened.