The wit to woo

“Love thy neighbor,” quipped Mae West, “ and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier.”

Easier, too, to love Miss Mae for her wisdom and sparkling wit. As the Lady said, “A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up.”

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With the near-confluence of Darwin Day and St Valentine’s Day, we’re shooting Cupid’s arrows in both directions this year!

Charles Darwin is famed for his work On the Origin of Species, which posited the theory of evolution. Central to his theory were natural selection and the struggle for survival.

In a later book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin addressed another great force of evolution: natural selection’s cuter sibling, sexual selection.

The most famous example of sexual selection in the wild is the peacock’s tail. Size matters to peahens – so much so that peacocks risk their lives to pull the birds! Peahens love big, beautiful tails. Peacocks oblige by growing radial arrangements of yard-long feathers with iridescent blue and bronze eye-spots and a raunchy rattle when they strut.

A peacock’s tail is heavy; it requires lots of energy to grow and to drag around. Far from enhancing his survival, it makes him more of a sitting duck (sorry, Mr Peacock!) for the lion with the lead piping in the kitchen. But therein lies the point: just being able to produce and manage that tail says to the ladies: “Hey babe, look what great genes I have and how well-nourished, strong and fit I am.” No matter that a lesser tail would help him flee The King. For choosy peahens, a glorious tail signifies fitness and they select to mate with the boys with the finest fans.

Fundamental to sexual selection in the animal kingdom is female choice. Males show strength and savvy to advertise their genetic fitness to females. Chez the human animal, however, there is greater mutuality of choice, perhaps because we stay together so long to bring up our offspring and also because we survive better in groups, with all the jealousies, jostling for status and uneasy peace that social living can bring.

In The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the source of traits we find most charmingly human have been wired into our beings through millions of years of sexual selection. In much the same way that a peacock’s tail announces his fitness, early humans exercised a preference for ‘warm, witty, creative, intelligent, generous companions’ that is still in force today in our tastes and character traits.

While our physical bodies have carried us through evolution, our mental capacities have puzzled scientists from an evolutionary standpoint. Language, culture, art, drama, poetry, fiction, humour, comedy, music, sports, philosophy and political establishments (!) have long been seen by scientists as surplus to survival. (In one case, at least, we might agree! 😉 )

Miller, however, thinks otherwise: ‘Ever since the Darwinian revolution, this survivalist view has seemed the only scientifically respectable possibility. Yet it remains unsatisfying. It leaves too many riddles unexplained. Human language evolved to be much more elaborate than necessary for basic survival functions alone. From a pragmatic biological viewpoint, art and music seem like pointless wastes of energy. Human ideology and morality seem irrelevant to the everyday business of finding food and avoiding predators.’

The most distinctive aspects of our minds, he argues, actually evolved through sexual choices our ancestors made. For Miller, the human mind and the peacock’s tail have a lot in common. By intelligently courting partners for their campfire stories, cave drawings and verbal dexterity, our ancestors became the force behind the evolution of the human mind as a sexually magnetic home entertainment system. Not only might a creative mind better survive the Savannah; personal warmth, linguistic facility, artistic expression, athletic prowess, wit, humour, kindness, generosity and moral standards displayed (a) skill and energy above and beyond the mundane and (b) characteristics needed to live in relative peace in social groups – highly-prized traits for parenting children together.

The natural world doesn’t care if a volcano erupts and shrouds your village in lava but sexual selection does. Natural selection represents the cards you are dealt by your environment; sexual selection represents your choice to create the fittest, most fertile and gifted offspring you can, who will survive in that world and keep your genes alive.

Noting that science has had a hard time understanding why language and culture evolved in humans, Miller suggests that ‘…sexual selection is unusually fast, powerful, intelligent and unpredictable.’ In other words, it analyses things at warp speed and plays to win, while natural selection may take millennia to effect change. To use the analogy of a casino, natural selection is an amateur poker player; sexual selection is the house.

So if we delight in witty banter or treading the boards or dancing Swan Lake, we ultimately have our ancestors’ courting to thank. Freud and others long sensed a sexual element in the arts but it is no subliminal message we find; rather, the very force of human creation has its source in sexual selection. Moonlit dodo dinners à deux might not have helped our forebears find more food or flee the tiger. But their cave-wall “etchings” may have been Pleistocene classifieds, publicising their fitness as clever potential mates. By helping each other survive and boosting the prowess and knowledge of offspring, they also made our species evolve the talents, gifts and skills we enjoy today.

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The story began when She said to He: ‘Why don’t you come up sometime and see me? Come on up, I’ll tell your fortune…’

Happy V-Day and D-Day 🙂 x