Original publication in We Still Like [] literary magazine, 2011 (3), pp. 42-47
Contrary to evolutionary models of humanity that exaggerate the primacy of larger brains (an example of tail-wagging-dog), the freeing of our hands as a result of obligate bipedality is a popular and for more likely catalyst for the development of much of modern human behavior. It sheds considerable light on the
fact that a lot of girls are inordinately attracted to guys who can play guitar, for example, even if they can
only play the first three chords of about five songs by John Mayer and one or
two by Tom Petty – the bare minimum, in other words.
I’d never really gotten my head around
this unusual contingency, because, being an unwitting child of the “evolutionary”
mythology that is still so prevalent in modern intellectual circles, I’d always
assumed that people evolved to select for mates with adaptive traits that
underscore their fitness as spouses and child-bearers; why, under that narrow
paradigm, would broad swaths of young women be more attracted to a scraggly,
awkward, and often jobless immature man-child than to a rugged, intelligent,
hard-working young man? (I harbor no illusions about the fact that my wonder
emanated primarily from basic jealously, which springs eternal.) How could the
very aspects that make someone a terrible provider also make that person
inordinately appealing? At last, evolutionary theory and behavioral ecology have
provided a reasonable answer.
Beginning several million years ago,
humans started to walk upright rather than on all fours. The reasons for this
are still unclear, and hypotheses range from the ability to grab fruit from
trees to the ability to see farther away to, believe it or not, the ability to
keep one’s head above water when evading water-shy lions by standing in a
river. Whatever the reason, our upright stature subsequently freed our hands
from the previously monopolizing purposes of forward ambulation and/or
climbing. Suddenly, what with our opposable thumbs and all, we could grab,
manipulate, and utilize tools, and it probably didn’t take long – the mere
blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense – for this to begin having significant
implications for the morphological future of our ancestors.
Biological evolution is a
non-linear, non-directional process of adaptation to environment by the
selection and retention of preferable traits. This is typically, although
certainly not always, done through the ubiquitous Darwinian method of “natural
selection,” whereby limits and parameters of an ecosystem apply the selective
pressures. In a cold climate, for example, animals with thick insulation and
efficient homeostatic systems are the most likely to thrive; in snowy
environments, animals that are lighter in color are the most likely to evade
predators; and so on. When environments change, it is those animals that adjust
in the fastest and most thorough manner to the new environmental parameters that
gain the reproductive upper hand. But the term “environment” can be misleading,
especially in our modern era of “environmentalism” which, at least in the
popular sense, translates roughly to “ecstatic love for all natural things that
aren’t human.” An environment is a conglomeration of living conditions, pure
and simple, and environments can span the gamut from very basic organic
ecosystems of soil and rain to exasperatingly complex constructs of concrete,
steel, automobiles and computers and processed food-like substances. A house is
an environment; so is a workplace, a community, a city, a country. And
environmental conditions need not even be physically tangible things – in the
modern world, for example, it is expected that people will obey laws and act in
certain ways, even though expectations aren’t physical things and do not
physically exert any force. And a person with a propensity to fulfill the
incorporeal expectations of a cultural environment is “fit” in just the same
was as an animal with a propensity for camouflage in a snow bank. This is known
as “cultural selection,” as opposed to natural selection, and the erratic and
largely unpredictable offspring of the two is called “sexual selection.”
In his exhaustive tome The Ancestor’s Tale, evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins notes the following observation: “anytime I see
sudden and erratic changes in evolutionary direction, I think sexual selection.” Sexual selection
doesn’t really follow any rules, at least not in the sense that “rules” in
science are thought to be logical constructs. Two of biologists’ favorite
examples come from the world of birds. Peacocks have enormous fans of
brightly-hued tail feathers, which take considerable and expensive proteins to
construct; are heavy and bulky, and cause the bird unnecessary trouble in
flight; and are effectively a PEACOCK OVER HERE sign to any predators that
aren’t totally blind. The peacock’s elaborate fan is, in other words, opposed
in every way to what logic dictates should be an advantageous adaptation, and
yet the beasts proliferate – why? Because the sexual success of peacocks with
the biggest and most alluring fans gives their genes a significant edge in the
game of reproduction, such that a peacock with a gigantic and burdensome fan
will likely father the bulk of offspring in a given area before succumbing to
an almost-inevitable death in the jaws of a predator.
The other favorite example is a species
of small birds that live in Papua New Guinea called bower birds. Male bower
birds go to practically unbelievable lengths to create practically unbelievable
twig-and-branch constructions, called “bowers,” that often look like gazebos or
backyard canopies with elaborate collections of colorful items – flowers, bits
of fruit, beetle wings, leaves, mushrooms, rocks – carefully and deliberately
arranged inside like displays in a museum. Some of them are as large as garden
sheds. Amazingly, these bowers are not simply large, densely decorated nests;
the birds live and sleep in small, unassuming nests of common shape and size.
The bowers are used exclusively to attract mates. More amazingly, these considerable
showpieces also follow regional “customs,” so that a bower which may be
considered a perfect and exemplary product in one area will not attract a
single female mate in another. Parallels with human culture and its own
regional customs are tantalizing. Meanwhile, the amount of time and energy
involved in a small bird constructing something of that size, and amassing the
requisite collection of baubles arranged throughout its interior, is a
behavioral example of the same lack of logic that underlies the physical adaptation
of peacock fans. But, again, the advantage outweighs the disadvantage: while a
male bower bird may attract predatory attention and/or totally exhaust itself
while erecting the most attractive bower in the region, he has a competitive
edge over his rivals for passing on his genes beforehand.
While these examples seem to be
inconsistent with commonplace logic they do fit comfortably into the predictive
framework of behavioral ecology. As an evolutionary approach to understanding
behavior, behavioral ecology approaches behaviors as sets of traits selected
for their economic fitness (note: economic in the sense of general value, not in the specific sense of money). In the light of purely mechanical models of evolution,
peacocks’ tails and bower birds’ twig-figured museums are unfit adaptations,
being inefficient uses of energy and burdensome, predator-attracting
frivolities; but in the light of behavioral ecology, these same phenomena
exhibit fitness for their environments because their value to mates outweighs
their mechanical disadvantages. In other words, even though gaudy tail feathers
and excessive artistic displays wouldn’t seem to do anything for their creators
other than shorten their life expectancies, the attractiveness of these things
to members of the opposite sex is sufficient enough to neutralize and, indeed,
exceed such limitations in the overall scheme of the environment. Their
up-front value as attractors is greater than their long-term deficiency as
perils, and so they are beneficial. In behavioral ecology this is known as
“marginal value,” the idea that immediate value changes with quantity – be it
amount or duration in time – and that something perceived as very valuable will
be utilized immediately and excessively before it gets exhausted or depreciated.
This isn’t always true, certainly, but in many cases it is, and in the case of
sexual selection it appears to be true in spades.
So what’s the connection between all
of this and our upright stature and large brains? Chances are that, upon
adapting and learning to walk upright, ancestral hominids almost immediately
started using their dexterous and newly-freed limbs to manipulate (literally)
tools. And chances are just as likely that they immediately started using this
newfound boon to outcompete one another. The better one is at using his or her
hands for constructing houses, collecting nuts and berries, hunting, building
fires, weaving textiles or baskets, or whatever else can be imagined, the more
likely that person is to have his or her genes passed along. In the beginning,
it was almost definitely pure natural selection that exerted the selective
pressure on the winners and losers in this scenario, as the people best-suited
for survival were probably those who could best manipulate physical things to
assure it. He or she who gathers the most food and keeps away the most lions is
likely to have the most kids. And all the while, as manipulation techniques
and, eventually, tools became more and more complex, so did the intellectual
capacity that directed them – bigger brains, in other words, are most likely
the result of increasing complexity of tasks related to manipulation of
materials, or so the modern gospel goes. Additionally, at some point it is
likely that simple ecological pressures were joined by the vagaries of sexual
selection, and the same hands that were once used to secure survival and
subsistence started to be used to impress others. This may or may not have been
a conscious or deliberate development, and I rather suspect that it wasn’t, but
it still goes a long way toward explaining artistic propensity and its
exaggerated marginal value in at least one culture that comes to mind: mine.
And now we come back to the issue of
girls and their inordinate attraction to scruffy shitheads who can play guitar
but display practically nothing else of social or biological worth. Bearing in
mind that I am talking about my own experiences in contemporary Middle America,
and that I can’t make any pronouncements on the male/female interactions in
other societies for the simple reason that I’ve never lived in any others, I
can say with certainty that this plays itself out over and over again in the
modern United States and is by no means an unusual circumstance. True, the
details may vary – in some cultural settings it isn’t guitar-playing but
dancing, or snowboarding (an example of physical aptitude, to be sure, but by
no means an example of fitness as a parent), or whatever – but the basic model
is awfully common. In light of the revelations of behavioral ecology and the
current evolutionary model that puts manipulative dexterity at the center of
the development of the human animal, it seems not only likely but in fact very
probable that people will, at some or several points in place and history,
place far greater value on behavioral traits that are at once expensive and
useless than on ones that are more advantages in a utilitarian or parental
sense. For at least the foreseeable future, bower birds will continue to build
extravagantly frivolous art galleries until they’re too tired to fly away from
jaguars, peacocks will continue to waste egregious quanta of calories on tails
that make them look just as appealing to their mates as to predators and
poachers, and douchebags will spend all of their free time learning the
catchiest bars of “American Pie” instead of studying math or exercising – and
all of these will succeed gloriously in the face of logic and reason. No dog
bites its own tail quite so hard as science, and we scientists are a toothy
breed. I should have learned to play the guitar.
