Chapter one: The Basics of Evolutionary Change and Why we might Care about it in the Grand Scheme of Things Female
Introduction
The purpose of this first chapter is to get you in the mood. It will attempt to provide you with a simple, layperson’s flyby of how evolution works, how sexual selection fits in to evolution, and why feminists might care about it. It lays down the foundation for future chapters in this essay, suggesting that the canon of evolutionary psychology as currently practiced does not adequately address female issues. Instead the focus of research is skewed towards the maintenance of mainstream social sexual norms. The argument made in this opening chapter will suggest that the methodology and epistemology of evolutionary psychology is unnecessarily narrow, only serving to entrench the traditional androcentric viewpoints of sexual selection as originally expounded by Darwin in the Descent of Man. It suggests that more qualitative and relativistic use of research materials would be useful, particularly serving a female-centric ‘companion’ epistemology to complement the current androcentric canon.
This essay not only borders on the irreverent, it deliberately seeks to be both provocative and contrary. The style in which it is written has developed from this viewpoint, which deviates considerably from mainstream academic writing. It is highly subjective and does not shy from developing hypotheses for which there is no existing body of research. Indeed, it is argued that gaping holes exist in the current body of research that have been proactively evaded up to this point, and this should be addressed, even if in an irreverent and subjective manner in the first instance. Ultimately, I would rather it was readable than pure in form of presentation.
The chapter begins by my layman’s understanding of the relevant primary theories. These theories are threaded through with exemplars, some of which are common in the mainstream debates, and some that have occurred to me as I have spent time studying the subject. Hopefully they will provide a mental visual stimulus which will aid understanding of the concepts, and indeed provide a clear and present appreciation of my opinions of the concepts themselves.
Finally a spoiler alert: words of a personal and sexual nature will be used.
Evolution: More than just Surviving
What evolutionary theory boils down to is how well an organism can deal with the time and place of their existence. Of course, it is first and foremost about surviving, because there is not a lot of point in debating anything else if surviving comes to an end. However, evolution is also about ‘getting on’ in life: about how we make the most out of our circumstances. This is important. Sure, evolution discusses the survival of the fittest to survive, but it is also deeply involved in looking at the hierarchies of existence. So evolution looks at how organisms can avoid being eaten by predators, or can find other organisms to eat at a species level. However, it also looks at how individuals within a species compete with each other for the easiest life.
Now, evolutionary processes can be divided into different types and sections, and we will obviously be doing quite a lot of that throughout this essay. At this point, the division is between natural selection and sexual selection, because this division echoes the difference between survival and having an easier life.
By and large, natural selection is the fight and flight survival stuff. You know the kind of thing: not being eaten by the lions and bringing home the bacon. How we get along with other species in our environment in such a way as to survive another day. However, as the old joke goes, surviving another day does not mean that we have to be faster than the lions. We just have to be faster than the slowest person trying to outrun the lions. As far as I am aware, lions do not have some weird sense of dignity whereby they feel that they have to go after the fastest prey. No, we tend to assume they will go for the prey that involves the least amount of effort. So we are assuming that if someone else is slower than us, then they are the one getting eaten.
This is a good piece of information to know, by and large. However, it is information that is a bit off to one side of the natural selection of running away from lions per se. It is more about how you can compare yourself to others of your own species, and the individual’s chances of survival relative to one another. I could be Linford Christie, but if I am the only one being chased by the lion, I am toast. On the other hand I could be a little old lady, but if I am competing with a six month old baby, I still might be able to outrun them. So in a sense, natural selection is absolute: it is the equipment you come into the environment with that defines what problems you are going to have to solve. Sexual selection is more of a relative issue: it is defined by the quality of the set of equipment you have compared to someone else in your species.
Now sexual selection is usually defined as dealing specifically with the organism’s ability to attract a mate for coitus: you may be able to outrun the lions (or at least outrun other people trying to outrun lions) but unless you get pregnant, give birth and keep the child safe until they reach sexual maturity themselves, you have not yet passed on your genes. As far as it goes, this is true. Whether or not we agree with Richard Dawkins when he says that genes pro-actively seek out opportunities to reproduce themselves, we can all pretty much agree that differences between one generation and the next is the crux of evolution. So choosing between potential mates for coitus influences the direction of evolution. So far so good.
Evolution and Academia: Strange Bedfellows
However, the way we investigate the process choosing between potential mates for coitus is heaped choc full of social stuff and human assumptions. In fact, the reason I personally find evolutionary psychology so damn fascinating is that taking away the social and human stuff is so infernally tricky to do. Some of the assumptions we make about sexual selection and mate selection are downright misogyny. Sorry guys, but read the chapter on Darwin’s opinions before you object to that. Besides, some of the other assumptions we make are based on our sheer humanity: the level of understanding we have of the connection between coitus and childbirth, our ability to communicate our understanding of how we got here and, indeed, our understanding of the process of evolution itself.
Perhaps most vitally, our ability to project past and present trends into the future can cloud our hypotheses on the hows and whys of evolution. We assume basic information such as the connection between coitus and pregnancy and childbirth. Sure, as an adult it might seem ridiculous to you that I would question whether all organisms know that babies are the result of coitus. On the other hand, we all know of children who have asked where babies come from. Why don’t children automatically know where babies come from? Young children manage to understand how to acquire their native language, so they have the cognitive capacity to ingest information and to express their own thoughts. Why isn’t one of these thoughts “When I grow up I will get a mate and we will have penetrative coitus and that will produce offspring”? They don’t think that because that information does not come hard-wired at birth. On the contrary, it is information that they acquire through social interaction. Usually through social interaction adults try to keep from them for as long as possible under the heading of “innocence of childhood”. Now before I go any further, I am not suggesting that children should be sexualised. No, no, no. What I am saying is that there is no inherent, natural state of understanding the relationship between coitus and babies. The only reason children lose that state of “innocence” is through social interaction. In other words, we may develop an attraction to physical contact with others as we grow, but we do not automatically understand the consequences.
This is the kind of assumption I am referring to: where we assume that we always knew a bit of information, even if we have some evidence to suggest to the contrary. We as humans are so damn clever that we sometimes forget that we have developed bodies of knowledge that we have to pass on. More, we all accept the knowledge as so basic and obvious that we believe them to be universally known and applicable.
The problem with this, of course, is that if we find evidence to the contrary, we tend to dismiss it, or try to explain it in such a way as to fit in with our assumptions. Take the Virgin Mary. She didn’t really have a spontaneous pregnancy – it is a fairy tale, right? It is an analogy of her spirituality. Because spontaneous birth without coitus is not possible in humans. I’ll leave that one with you. You may like to ponder it or you may like to just toss it to the four winds. It’s up to you. All I am saying is that pondering it can lead to some interesting trains of thought. And that hopefully I can throw some more at you during the course of the essay. You have been warned.
Awww. Do I have to?
In the meantime, we are going to assume that – in the normal course of events – if you want a baby you have to have penetrative coitus. With a man. This isn’t LGBT biased, it is biology. I am going to discuss homosexuality and its function later, but in the meantime, for purposes of this present discussion, successful reproduction involves penile penetration to ejaculation without contraception. (Contraception is a big deal in evolutionary psychological research – and at times laugh out loud funny – so there is a whole section on it later.).
In some quarters, penile penetration to male ejaculation is known as “real sex”, and everything else is “foreplay”. “Sex” is a tricksy word, and it can cover a multitude of nuance. So what I am going to do is call penetration to male ejaculation “coitus”. I am doing this to denote that penetration to male ejaculation is only one particular form of sexual activity, rather than the be-all and end-all. Granted, it is the one that can get you pregnant (ceteris paribus) and since evolution is about reproduction, it is an important and central concept for this essay. Besides, continuing to call it penile penetration to male ejaculation is a mouthful, and that is a play on words too far! Let’s just go with coitus.
Oh, and the physical bits we own are denoted by the word “gender” rather than “sex”. So, for example, I am a member of the female gender, rather than the female sex. This removes any confusion between the act of coitus and the state of being in a gendered body. Yeah, it might be a really pedantic, nit-picky point to make, but I am making it anyway. Sure, there are a lot of other, much worse gender-based words that could be used, and you can use them if you like. I choose clarity, and I try to get as close to a well-reasoned argument as I can muster. From this point, we can elaborate to concepts such as gender specificity and gender differentiation without constantly evoking the spectre of the act of coitus by using the word “sex”.
Right, with those caveats and preferences in the bag, let’s start the good stuff. The way evolution works in biological terms is not up for debate here. It might be the case that in biology research circles this is a very simplistic explanation, but all I want to do is to pass on my interpretation of the mechanics in broad brush strokes.
How Evolution Works –ish: The View from the Laity
The basic principles of evolutionary change are:
Mutation
Mutations are the basic fuel of evolution. Some random part of the makeup of the organism changes from one generation to the other for reasons known only unto itself. Could be big, could be small, but a mutation can change the balance of the fitness of the individual organism and its environment. This can happen in both directions: it could result in the individual organism being better suited for the environment, or it could put it at a disadvantage. Having a deep understanding of mutations would really require knowing everyone’s genome, knowing how much of that genome changes per individual per generation, knowing how the environment changes and measuring what the outcome of the interaction is. Easy for me to say. Difficult to do in practice.
For mutations to be influential in evolutionary terms, you really need to pass them on, and this means that they could do with being non-fatal, and they would benefit from increasing the attractiveness of the mutant to the opposite gender. So, if the mutation means that you have a bigger nose, you might end up with better oxygen intake resulting in being able to run faster. That is obviously a natural advantage against the lions and against the other people running away from the lions. However, if the mutated nose is considered to be ugly by the opposite gender, then you lower your chances of having children. Swings and roundabouts.
Drift
Genetic drift is how the whole population of individuals changes over time, and the types of physical elements that become more or less prevalent. So if we stick with the case of big noses, a drift towards big noses would mean that you wouldn’t have a unique big nose that would give you a sexual selection advantage over others of your species who didn’t. On the contrary, it is more likely to be something like the quality of the environment where having a big nose was a good idea for everyone, so most people tended towards having one.
Drift is possible as a sexual selection where all the females of the species get together and decide on a few males to have coitus with, rejecting the rest of the males. This is called lekking: more later. If the males selected to be coitally active in a lek have a specific attribute, it will be passed on. If the active males do not have an attribute it wont. Even if the attribute is present in the majority of males. So females in a lek can eliminate and initiate large drifts depending on their lekking choices, and they can do so in a single generation. (Figure one). However, a caveat to this is that they have to work with what they have. Much as we might like to, wishing for attributes will not make them magically appear.
Now, evolutionary psychology is a circuitous subject and it is difficult to discuss any part of it without knowing other parts of it. Sometimes I will put in more than one explanation for clarity, or I may have to leave an explanation for later. This is one of those times.
There are a couple of things I would like to put in here for future reference. First is the homosexual thang. You may hear a lot of b/s about how a tendency towards same gender relationships are evolutionary dead ends, and at a purely genetic level, that is true: there will be no direct offspring. However, homosexuality hasn’t died out, and that is weird, isn’t it? I mean, at the very least, a “homosexuality” gene set is a tenacious bugger. It keeps on popping back up, even when we don’t sexually select for it. In fact, between you and me, the persistence of homosexuality is a bit of a fly in the ointment of evolutionary theorising. For example, Geoffrey Miller in his book “The Mating Mind” goes on at length about how great men are and how everything they ever did is attractive to females. He even suggests that some males might only be good enough for a few orgasms rather than a baby-father. Yet homosexuality is dealt with summarily in a page or so. Basically he shrugs his shoulders at it, and says he has no idea what homosexuality is doing keeping on coming back and making his nice theory more awkward.
Now I don’t know about you, but I find homosexuality a bit “Miss Marple”, and I am a bit perplexed as to why evolutionary model builders don’t find it a fascinating puzzle*. Hello! A sexual preference which is subject to drift in every generation, yet it pops up again in the next generation, again to be subject to drift, but lo! The next generation has a percentage of homosexual individuals. It isn’t a permanent evolutionary mutation because it is not passed on to the next generation (and we know this because there are lesbian baby-mothers and gay baby-fathers who produce heterosexual children), and it isn’t a proper drift because it refuses to lie down and become extinct. That’s fabulous, you tenacious sexual preference, you. Oh, I am absolutely going to be going there later.
*Well I have a few ideas, but they all include words like “blinkered”; “arrogant”; and “arse”. I don’t know these people personally – they may genuinely believe that their theory is good to go without an explanation for homosexuality and be an absolute charmer to have afternoon tea with. So we are going with ‘benefit of the doubt’.
Recombination
Ok, technical hats at the ready, we are going to talk alleles and Mendel. It is not going to be uber-technical, simply because it is not my specialism and I can’t, but it is important to have a basic grasp of it.
Ok, so an allele is one of the pair of options open to a gene. There are two basic variations: both alleles are the same as each other or they differ from each other. When they are the same, then the gene will express itself the same way in the offspring as it does in the parent. Let’s use garden peas to stand in for alleles for the time being, so that we get the general hang of it. Garden peas are the poster children for alleles, and they are tasty and good for you. What’s not to like? The peas will enlighten you. Here we go.
So, for example, if you breed garden peas and you only have green peas, you will get green pea seeds. If you have green peas and yellow peas, then the offspring could be one or the other. One yellow and one green parent pea could produce a yellow or a green baby pea. With me so far? Ok.
Imagine your genes are parent peas (you saw that coming, didn’t you?). Each gene has two forms, they can be alike or they can be different. Where they are alike, there is no problem: like mother like daughter. However, where the parent peas are different, it becomes just plain annoyingly complicated. Where the parents are yellow and green, the baby will be yellow or green, sure, but the chances of being a green or a yellow baby pea is not fifty/fifty. One of the pea alleles is a bit of an extrovert, and the other one a bit of an introvert. The extrovert is called ‘dominant’ and the introvert is called ‘recessive’. The baby pea will take on the characteristics of the extrovert allele. However, the baby pea also gets given the introvert version, but it sits in its bedroom all day reading books and listening to music.
So if the baby pea gets a dominant green and a recessive yellow allele, it will be green. However, it still carries the potential to be yellow. Still with me? The baby pea with different parent peas can pass on its potential yellowness to the next generation, even if it is green as grass itself. It is a closet yellower. It doesn’t look any less green than the pure greens, but the yellow lurks like the Addams family butler.
This is where Mendel comes in. He bred peas, and his findings led to two principles:
1. The Principle of Segregation
2. The Principle of Independent Assortment
The principle of segregation is basically an accounting system, where the baby pea gets one allele from mummy and one from daddy. Otherwise, the baby pea would have double the number of alleles her parents had, and that is quickly going to get out of hand.
In the principle of independent assortment, each pair of alleles has no direct influence on any other pair of alleles for, say, the colour of the pea flower. So if one parent was green with purple flowers, and the other was yellow with white flowers, baby pea could be yellow with purple flowers. It’s basically saying you can mix and match.
This is not evolution all by itself: the baby pea might be new, but it is only working with the old alleles it inherits. In order to get evolution proper, we need to add in mutation, where new alleles are created and become dominant, and where some alleles get lost through drift. For example, if all the peas with all the yellow alleles get eaten rather than replanted, then there are no more yellow peas, just green ones. The yellow peas are extinct. They are ex-peas. What recombination of alleles does do is to provide variety that the rest of the evolutionary forces can choose from. Sometimes, the evolutionary forces all choose the one type of allele (i.e. life eats all the yellow peas) and when this happens, all the individuals in the species have the same trait. This is known as being fixed within a population. Like a red wine stain on a white carpet, a fixed trait is very difficult to shift. This is usually because the trait does a decent job, under the circumstances. May as well pour the whole damn bottle of wine onto the carpet and hey presto – a red carpet. It is possible for a new mutation to come along which does a better job, but it tends to have its work cut out.
However, remember the recessive alleles? It might look like life has eaten all the yellow peas, but you never know – there might be some yellow alleles hiding away just waiting for the right set of circumstances to become dominant.
Now, as I was mentioning earlier, recombination has a bit of a tricky time explaining the persistence of homosexuality in a population. My favourite one is that there is a pair of alleles: one gay and one straight, and the straight one dominates most of the time so that the species doesn’t go extinct. However, everyone has a gay streak in them: an allele that could potentially decide to get off its behind, come out of the recessive closet, and audition for musicals (I know I know – stereotype. Just let me have the one mistake and I will make up for it later). The reason for the existence of a gay allele is something we will go into later, but for now, I just wanted to put that point in there so that we could all let it settle and see whether we could live with that idea. Yes I am saying that we all have a little bit of gay in us. It’s a theory – try it on.
Migration
The short version of migration is that stuff moves about. Even plant seeds are blown to the four winds, and end up in different locations where there might be different kinds of seeds to play mummies and daddies with. Playing mummies and daddies with new kinds of seeds makes even more kinds of recombinations. Hoorah! Note that new combinations of mummies and daddies are viewed in theoretical terms as a good thing. It may be the case that a particular mummy and daddy might produce a really good version, but this is not guaranteed, nor is it necessarily repeatable. So although you might be fabulous, your little brother or sister might be better suited to the environment in five years time. Take for example the French Revolution. If you were a noble parent offspring fifty years before the Revolution, you were on to a good thing. If you were born a couple of days ahead of it, the outlook might be a bit bleaker. The upshot is that having children by different fathers is not an evil, wicked thing to be doing. On the contrary, different fathers means that you are hedging your bets on fit offspring. Remember this the next time you hear some woman decried for having children from more than one father. And just wait until we get to Sperm Wars. Taking the different fathers hypothesis on now will set you up in a good place for dealing with the down low on female biological fitness later. Trust me on this one.
So, migration introduces the environment as an element in evolution. The baby pea might end up in a nice, organically rich field with loads of pals to play with, or it could end up on the pavement, and get squished underfoot. Spookily enough peas don’t grow well on pavements whilst squished. Pavement pea ends up at the wrong end of an evolutionary drift, field pea sends its allele combination into the next generation.
Migration also introduces the notion that the environment is a form of inheritance, as well as genes. To demonstrate this, let’s look at pea weights. Let’s imagine that the baby pea has to cross the pavement to get to the other side where the nice organically rich field is. Let’s also say that light peas travel further on the wind. In this case, light peas are more likely to reproduce than heavy peas, because heavy peas land on the pavement, and we all know where that ends. Of course, before the pavement had been built, heavy peas might have reproduced in the dirt the pavement was, but now that is only a fond memory in pea myths and legends when big fat peas were in their prime. Only light peas are successful peas these days of pavements. Goddam pavements spoil everything, changing stuff, and encouraging peas to go to Weightwatchers if they are to reproduce. Wow, that is sounding too familiar for comfort – I am going to stop there. Suffice to say one day you can be a fine example of a pea, next day you are utterly inadequate. It all depends on the environment you inherit.
Before I move on, though, I want to add the changing preferences of the opposite gender as an environmental selection. I want to suggest that, depending on where you live in the world, or the age you lived in would go part of the way to deciding whether or not you are good reproductive material. Just like the pea, Western advertising suggests that women should be light. There are some males that like “something to hold on to”, but light females are generally preferred hereabouts. Like the environment, attitudes towards the other gender can change, and they can squish you when they do. The upshot of this is that I have very little faith in the notion that there is one perfect model of beauty or fitness. This will become important as we go along.
Selection
So there is natural selection and there is sexual selection. Natural selection is the fighting and the flighting you are probably well and truly familiar with. Sexual selection is the “third F”: fornicating (yes, I do use the other F in private). In other words, if you put the two types of selection together, you have to stay alive long enough to get laid, and you have to be attractive enough for someone to want to do the horizontal stuff with you. It also helps if you can keep the offspring alive long enough to get to puberty.
Now my understanding of my genetics classes was that evolution is all the above stuff put together – that’s what makes it a fascinating topic. In my opinion, this is not wrong. However, if you try and butt evolutionary psychology up against genetics, one of the results is a bit unlikely. Let me run it past you.
I can do what now?
In evolutionary psychology, females select males on the grounds of the fitness of their traits. They do this because they want their offspring to have those same traits. However, if we look at recombination, we see that the traits are constructed by the dominant, extrovert alleles, whilst the introvert alleles are playing Joy Division. Ok, so we are not selecting for genes, we are selecting for the dominant allele. Big deal. What’s the difference? Well, I think it is a big ask for females to look at the dominant alleles and be able to decide which ones will be passed on as dominant alleles, and what the recessive allele may be like, and whether it has a good chance of becoming dominant in the next generation. As far as I can make out, the current reason for dominance and recession decisions is “chance”. That is, the alleles decide between themselves, and are too damn lazy to tell geneticists the rules of the dominance game.
In short,
a) If females do have an inbuilt ‘radar’ for potential dominant alleles, would a geneticist please point to it?
b) If my mate selections are anything to go by, I think I may have had a radar bypass at some point before puberty.
In other words, evolutionary psychologists start saying that the sexual selection for traits in my children is down to me, and I have no idea how that is supposed to work. I especially have no idea how that is supposed to work if you add in the complication of dominant and recessive alleles. What part of my brain is responsible for making these calculations? Could we make a cognitive model out of the process the way we do with memory or attention or perception? And if not, why not? Now to a certain extent, I have an answer ready: it is a methodological problem. Basically, evolutionary psychological research as an academic activity is only done in a certain way. I happen not to like the way it is done, and believe it is totally inadequate. People who get the results they want from the way it is done now will disagree. Of course they will. However, I would argue that methodology is a feminist issue in evolutionary psychology, and I would humbly ask you, dear reader, to keep in mind as we go along that the answers researchers produce depend on the questions they ask and how they go about finding out the answers. The shorthand word I will be using for this is ‘epistemology’. Epistemology is basically a polysyllable for ‘valid knowledge’ on a given subject. I believe that the epistemology of mainstream evolutionary psychology is manipulative, extremely narrow, and downright silly. Here again, I will weave this in as I go along and point it out as and when it seems appropriate. Don’t worry if you forget – I will remind you.
In the meantime, assuming we all have a decent grasp of roughly how evolution works, and what natural selection is, let’s look at sexual selection in a bit more detail.
Definition of Sexual Selection Criteria as currently used in the Evolutionary Psychology Industry (Bluffer’s Guide Version)
So to recap slightly, in evolutionary model-building, natural selections are traits increase the chances of an organism surviving in its environment. You know the kind of stuff – running away from big bad things, catching food, staying warm, and so on. Sexual selections are traits which increase the chances of any organism attracting a mate and reproducing.
So the first we need to do is find a way of telling what is a natural selection and what is a sexual selection. This can be quite tricky, because some traits fit both natural and sexual selection categories, such as good teeth. Teeth are good for biting and chewing, but a lovely smile can be very attractive. So far so good.
However, if we look at the example of teeth, whiter teeth are more likely to crumble quicker than more naturally yellow teeth because they are chalkier than yellow teeth. Teeth that are good for chewing and biting over a long period time would be more yellow. Whiter teeth may be less practical, but we might find them more attractive than yellow teeth. So yellow teeth would be a better natural selection and white teeth are a better sexual selection.
Sexual selections don’t have to run contrary to natural selection, but the way evolutionary psychology has developed, anything which is advantageous to the running away and the hunting and the fighting are all classified as natural selections, even if they are both natural and sexual good selections. Sexual selections tend to be classified as the stuff that runs contrary to natural selection: that is, it makes the hunting and the fighting more difficult. And that’s not all. The full list goes something like this.
A sexual selection:
The last criterion is, of course, not one the way it is generally described in text books. But there has been a tendency in the research domain over the last ten years or so to ascribe sexual selection status to any attribute which appears to be irrational. Rationality, on the other hand, tends to be associated with natural selection. There are a great many sexual selections which we can’t yet explain, and it is true that females are under no obligation whatsoever to find rational and sensible attributes sexy. Indeed, it is likely that most of us - at some time - have known what the sensible, rational choice would be, but we have been irresistibly drawn to the lustful choice instead. So we know that some choices are more logical and sensible than others, and we know that irrationality exists in sexual selection.
However, it is an interesting little niggle that there has been an association between female choices and irrationality for a very long time. Hands up anyone who is not aware that males consider themselves to be the more rational gender, and females to be the more irrational gender. We are, it is claimed, more prone to be governed by our emotions than males. So it would make sense to a bunch of male evolutionary psychologists that all these irrational traits have ultimately come from some silly girly choice in the dim and distant past, whereas the sensible choices such as opposable thumbs are the rational, manly choices of hunters and fighters who need to make tools and intercontinental nuclear missiles.
However, the irrational choice is not a purely female prerogative, no matter who is telling you that it is. We know this because of patriarchy. In a classic of example of being hoisted by one’s own petard, the social hierarchy of males being in supreme power and control over female sexuality has thrown up some male sexual selections of its own, leaving a trail of traits to show exactly what males have preferred in a female mate. So do you want to make some guesses now as to what these might be, and see if you are right later down the line? Got some? On we go.
This, of course, is the downside of absolute power and control: the powerful tend to express their wildest dreams, and insist on having their environment work exactly as they want it. I view this as one of the few upsides of patriarchy: we know what men want because they have been insisting on getting it for too long. Better, they have insisted on passing on their daughters from father to husband for long enough for sexual selection to take hold and show itself in some sexually selected physical traits in women.
For example, large, ornamental breasts could be a sexually selected trait by the male.
Large breasts do not augment breast-feeding, and therefore serve very little purpose other than to attract males. This suggests that males have preferentially sexually selected females with large breasts simply because they have an irrational desire for them. let me guess – you are one for one so far. Gold star for you!
The notion of a small waist and flat stomach is an interesting one. We will be discussing the “Hip to Waist Ratio” (I kid you not) in later chapters because it has played quite the role in some research projects. But just for now, we are using it as an example of a sexual selection by a male which is irrational. What we do is we look at the bluffer’s guide checklist for sexual selections, and we ask questions of the trait in question.
The argument goes like this:
A stomach which is tight and flat is a contra-indicator of fertility, and a flabbier stomach shows a female’s fertility, as the skin post-pregnancy has been stretched, and tends to sag more than that of a female who has not been pregnant. A small waist could be considered a sexual selection by the male because at best it hides fertility, and at worst suggests a female may be infertile. The same is true of pert breasts where the nipples tend to point straight ahead rather than droop as they do after birth.
So, male preferences for pert breasts, small waists and flat stomachs are irrational sexual selections by the male. You get the idea? They have nothing to do with how well the woman will survive in the environment, and in some cases they could be a hindrance (such as running away from lions impeded by large breasts (the women have the large breasts not the lions)). They (the breasts, not the lions) only appear in the female of the species, and they are not there at birth, but develop at puberty. Big breasts do not equate to more milk to feed an infant with, so they really have no practical value for survival purposes. They also have a wide bandwidth. This means that there is a large variety of sizes of breasts. A survival trait tends to hone in on a narrow range of options which best fit the job they are built for. A bit like the range of Apple Macs (where do I get my royalty cheque?)
So we can see that if we ask a few questions based on the check list provided earlier, we can make a good guess as to whether or not it is a sexual selection. Breasts size is subject to sexual selection by the male. That is, males select females based on the size of their breasts. This is not a rational choice based on assisting the female in her survival prospects, but is purely based on lust. That is the point of a sexual selection: it attracts the opposite gender. The members of the species with the most attractive traits – such as large breasts – get more attention and more offers of coitus regardless and sometimes even contrary to the evidence of fertility (yes, again, I know, I know, I am not telling you anything you didn’t know already).
Now there are problems with breasts being sexually selected. Indeed, there is a problem with males sexually selecting anything about females at all. The following argument on the investment in offspring is offered often with glee by male evolutionary psychologists. Check it out:
A woman who has coitus during pregnancy is only still going to produce one child every nine months. There is no way of increasing the rate of production. A man who has coitus with other women while his wife is pregnant stands a chance of doubling his output. He can’t speed up production of any one female, but he can have more than one production line running at the same time. So large breasts are only any good to the woman up to the point of pregnancy. After that, they revert to a natural selection, where they are used to feed baby. So although a woman could pull any man she wants with a big pair of breasts, and has a wider range of choice between males offering sex, the big boobs don’t allow her to speed up the rate at which she can produce children – it is a fixed term.
A male, on the other hand, could speed up his rate of production of offspring if he has traits which are luscious to females. Evolutionaries (like missionaries, but with a spiritual calling to persuade themselves males are superior. Not the position…for now….although we will get there, too), are mostly male, and they like to fantasise that they could have a different woman every half hour or so, because that is their maximum physical limit for sperm production.
Back in the real world he would more likely be looking at two or three children at the most per nine months, because, frankly, most men are average looking. That’s why it is called average. However, the notion of having more than one production line going at one time feeds the deeply loved notion that the world will be populated by his descendants and he wins (we are not sure what he wins, but he wins. It is like the “global race” but with offspring instead of all the money). This is where the male fantasy of a harem of women comes from. Of course, much as males claim the harem is similar to Fordism and is all about maximising the production line, we know it is about power and control, guys. Give it up. But like all good stories, it has a kernel of truth. Males can produce children in parallel almost to the limit of his physical endurance. Females are restricted to one a year, pretty much. Which is a bitch in a pub debate when you can’t think of a good come-back.
We have seen that the production line principle means that having a really effective sexual selection – like killer mammaries – does not do anything for females in evolutionary terms, because it doesn’t spread the woman’s genes any further or faster than they do already. But males, well, having a face like Brad Pitt is going to have a superb impact on your chances of getting laid more often. As a male, the more you get laid, the more children are going to have your genes. So it makes sense that most of the sexual selections in the world are found in the male (84% or so depending on who you talk to) of the species. It’s the males who have the big brash tail feathers, the elaborate songs, or the innate desire to interior design (in the case of the bower bird). And they have them because it makes a huge difference to the number of offspring they can have.
So the male rate of offspring production is much more flexible than the female’s. This flexibility means that it makes more sense for males to have the sexual selections, because it will have an impact on the number of offspring they can have. If you can’t change the rate of offspring production, there is no point in having a sexual selection. It’s like having a turbo button on a car dashboard of a car that doesn’t have a turbo charger.
Like passing a watermelon
Let me take this line of thought a bit further. Now, we will discuss runaway sexual selection in more depth later, but in the meantime, basically, it means that the opposite gender will select for it, even if the result may be fatal. Let me run this past you:
If a male selected a female sexual partner on the grounds of being able to reproduce his genes, then one might imagine that the primary selection criteria would be the woman’s ability to give birth to live young. That is the rational choice for reproduction. Job done. Now, if this were the case, males could reasonably be expected to select females on the basis of her proven capacity to become pregnant and bear children. So, they would select the females with external signs of having given birth already: flabby tummy skin where it had stretched during late pregnancy, and droopy breasts which have had obvious use in feeding a child. Mothers will know the sorts of things I mean.
But human males are attracted to females for attributes which are essentially the opposite of fertility attributes. Let’s take waist to hip ratio. A man goes pretty much straight up and down, and his waist is not that much smaller than his hips. A woman, on the other hand, is curvy, with a waist smaller than her hips. So this only appears in one of the genders. It becomes obvious during puberty, and there is no adaptive or survival value to a small waist. (Yes, obesity is a problem, but it is not universally true that women with smaller waist to hip ratio outlive women with a bit of a tummy and smaller hips). Here again, going through the sexual selection checklist, waist to hip ratio is looking like a sexual selection of the male by the female. This is getting to be a bit of a habit.
Let me take this argument a stage further, and press on to look at another form of sexual selection which works in much the same way for the same reasons: the preference for virgin females. This is also a sexual selection by males which could reduce his chances of producing offspring. Yes, virginity is only a temporary state, and it is not a trait like big boobs, but it is still a sexual selection because it is selected preferentially by males.
Ok, so let’s imagine you lived in a society where virginity is necessary for marriage. If you lose your virginity on a wild night out before you are married, you may get pregnant once, but then the rest of the men will shun you for marriage. If you are not married, you may not have any more mates, and that means no more children. On the other hand if you are a virgin at marriage, and marriage lasts more than one year, then you will have a mate who could impregnate you year in and year out. At best (or in my opinion, my worst nightmare) you could give birth to perhaps twenty children before you a) died of exhaustion; b) hit menopause. So the virgin in this scenario has the potential for more childbearing than the non-virgin, and that is the definition of evolutionary success – lots of little ‘you’s in the next generation. In other words, males take the risk of acquiring a female who is infertile instead of acquiring one who is proven to be able to give birth. Why does he do this?
Although we might be a bit more liberal than we used to be, any culture which has words like “slut” or the equivalent holds the same view at some level. (By the way, while you are having that pub argument, try replacing the word “slut” with the phrase “proponent of genetic biodiversity”: means roughly the same).
But of course, you would expect that this type of value judgement of female promiscuity wouldn’t hold any sway in evolutionary psychology, where there are scientists involved, for goodness sake. They know how to do statistical analysis, and get papers published in peer review journals with very few pictures and very small type. They produce the kind of writing that would send small children to sleep if you read it to them (yes, I have done this to my offspring, and it does work). Big words, technical jargon, genetics, professorships. They have letters after their name like PhD to show how much they know about it. Surely they deal in evidence, right? Well sort of, but I refer you to the methodological problems hinted at earlier. The epistemology of evolutionary psychology ignores some issues in preference for other more convenient issues.
The preferred areas of study tend to be more based in social concepts than in the validity of a physical trait. So they say things like “men prefer small waists”, but sort of bypass the ironic elements of hidden fertility potential we just discussed. They just seem to take it as read that if males say they prefer small waists, there must be an evolutionary reason in there somewhere. Of course, if they tried to explain WHY men prefer small waists, they might end up with the conclusion that males are irrational, and that is not likely to appear in a peer reviewed journal article. So rather than say that they are just irrational, they either ignore the paradox or make up some bull that is difficult to disprove.
You might argue that –as men – they would know from experience what men like. True. But it is not rigorous investigation with scientific principles. I like digestive biscuits. They are not good for my evolutionary chances of reproducing, because they are doing no damn good in the fight for a small waist (and shockingly, dear reader, I don’t give a rat’s ass). This does not mean that I should write a journal article debating how evolutionarily fit the digestive biscuit is. I could ask a hundred thousand women in a survey about their digestive biscuit habits and relate it to the number of offers of sex they get. I could get the result that women who eat digestives get more offers of sex than those who eat chocolate fudge cake. Would that make the digestive biscuit a sexual selection? No.
However, it would make the digestive biscuit a handicap in the achievement of a sexually selected trait such as a small waist. This double negative would ironically mean that you would be able to get the saggy tummy associated with fertility with a digestive biscuit but without giving birth. OMG the digestive biscuit is a natural selection! Well almost. And that kind of reasoning is why I am single.
My point is (yes, you may have suspected that a point was lurking somewhere in the shadows of that diatribe) that the use of the digestive biscuit is an ‘ad absurdum’: taking an idea to the outer reaches of reality and seeing if the principle still applies. If the theory doesn’t work ad absurdum, then maybe the whole principle has problems.
As far as I am aware, there is no compelling evidence to suggest that digestive biscuits are a sexual selection. I wish there was, sure. But sadly it is unlikely. In the same way, just because some people like some other aspect of life, such as a small waist, that does not necessarily make it a sexual selection. Each contender for the title of “sexual selection” needs to be examined on its own merits, and the evidence at least has to be at the level of reasonable doubt to be acceptable. Parts of the body that males find sexually attractive is a good start, sure, but that is all it is: a good start. For a start (well, another start after the good start), do all men everywhere like the same things? Because if men in different geographical regions like different things, then we could argue that these are social and fashion preferences rather than sexual selections. This does not exclude them from being sexual selections necessarily, but may only account for a trait which is specific to that region. A bit like kangaroos and Australia.
So, traditionally, and in some countries, currently, females have viewed their virginity as a precious commodity in attracting a male, and have made mate choices based on their possession of a virginity. Males have preferred women to have a virginity, so the ones with the moral fortitude to not have coitus before marriage are the ones who are selected. They have a level of willpower which allegedly separates the good girls from the sluts. It may be possible to identify something in the virgin bride’s mental makeup which has given her the strength to resist coital advances. This makes it an example of a psychological evolution rather than biological evolution – a conceptual attitude which gets more offspring. This mental fortitude may or may not be a natural selection, where the woman has found the best way to survive in the environment she finds herself in (think Jane Austen). However, this does not stop it being an irrational trait selection in the male. Irrational, you hear? Irrational. Counter-reproductive. The male penchant for virgins does nothing to enhance his reproductive success. He could have as many children with a female who was a virgin as he could in the same timeframe with a wild and promiscuous creature.
The fertility of a virgin is a bit ‘Schrodinger’s cat’. There is no way of knowing whether the female is capable of reproduction, and the only way of knowing whether she is fertile is to get pregnant. By preferentially choosing a virgin as a mate means that males are making mate choices which could impact negatively on their own reproductive potential. They may be spending time copulating with a sterile female. It’s like a mystery prize in a competition.
Preferences such as virginity are not mainstream discussion topics in evolutionary psychology, although there is a lively discussion about how male choices should all be considered to be rational, or at the very least be rationalised in terms of natural selection rather than sexual selection. You know the kind of thing: young women are at the prime of childbearing capacity, they look healthier, etc. This is a load of tosh. Males select females on highly irrational, counter-productive traits – both physical and conceptual – which could not wave to rationality on a clear day from a hilltop. We all know the reason that males want virgins is that they have an urge to be utterly and completely certain that the children she has are ALL his. It is a greed thing. It is a power and control thing. If you doubt this, I challenge you to find a research paper on the size of the vagina as an evolutionary selection.
Vaginal size is an issue, because that’s where the offspring come out. And lo and behold, males are hell bent on preferring females with tight ones rather than big ones. Human baby heads are big, and a tight vagina is practically the worst trait I could possibly think of at the point of giving birth. Is it possible to die in childbirth from having a vagina which is too tight? I don’t know. I suspect that a tight birth canal is more of an issue than a wide one. Remember we talked about runaway sexual selection being potentially fatal? I suggest there may be room for putting vagina size and fitness in the evolutionary psychology epistemology (she said in a calm voice).
What I do know is that – at the point of childbirth – the bigger the better from the mother’s point of view. Yeah, go find me a woman who has had a child to disagree with THAT statement. Good luck and bon voyage.
And talking of voyages, if we look at alternatives to western patriarchy, we find that the overarching preference for small vaginas is not universal. On the contrary, vaginal size is a subject which is covered in the Kama Sutra. And frankly, the Kama Sutra does a better job of dealing with it than most evolutionary psychologists. What the Kama Sutra says is that there are three sizes of vagina – small, medium, and large – and a good match for a couple is when the size of the vagina matches the size of her partner’s penis. The Kama Sutra also suggests these come in sizes small, medium, and large. Makes sense to me. So, the preference in Western males for females with small vaginas and their own preference for a large penis runs contrary to the Kama Sutra. More than that, a small vagina may make childbirth more painful or more difficult than a large vagina.
So, like the other examples around the female body we have touched on, males are basically making evolutionary psychological decisions which reduce the chances of choosing fertile females who find giving birth an absolute dawdle, and giving the woman’s daughters a better chance of having easy births. That would be a natural selection, because childbirth is not a walk in the park. It may not be your tight vagina that kills you, but it can still be deadly. Anything (watch my lips (careful)) anything that makes childbirth easier is going to be called a natural selection. I insist. It just is. If you would like to argue this with me, please do so in person. Preferably within punching range so that I don’t have to run after you with a weapon. In fact, I am going to argue that facilitating easy childbirth is not just A natural selection, it is THE natural selection, stupid. Put it this way: take out childbirth, and how far do you get with evolutionary theory? The phrase “are you still here?” springs to mind.
Oi, Big Head
But what about brain size I hear some people ask inside my head. Sure, brain size has got a bit to do with childbirth, and we will address that in subsequent chapters. But saying that brain size is the whole problem with childbirth is like saying that tusks are the whole elephant – it is a popular view, but not the whole one. How could we prove this? I know, we will go into labour wards and ask women in labour whether they would like to have a bigger vagina for the baby to come out of. I will give you 500 to one odds that more women in labour say yes than say no. Never mind this ten centimetre dilation lark, let’s make it fifteen, or even twenty! Hoorah!
But my point is that although the size of the baby’s head is a popular subject in almost every sphere of evolutionary psychology, whereas the size of the birth canal the baby comes out of is not. They are both suitable subjects for evolutionary fitness and natural selection, because if the head became just too big to get out, that is the human species wiped out. Pouff! No more humans within a generation. So slightly relevant then? Yes I believe so. Why isn’t it discussed? Because the human male sexual selection is for smaller vaginas to have coitus with.
The Direction of Selection: Like the Rumble in the Jungle but with no Gloves. A short concluding Statement on the Purpose of writing on Evolving for Girls and the Bliss Model.
So far we have discussed female traits selected by females, even though this runs contrary to the bluffer’s guide where the females do the selecting and the males do the having of the traits. As we discussed briefly, sexual selection traits in humans are the result of patriarchy. That is, the male has been in control of female sexuality for long enough that sexual selections have appeared in the female rather than solely in the male.
I have some ideas about how we ended up being controlled like this, but I can’t back them up, and I will not be suggesting that you believe me unconditionally. What I am suggesting is that the very existence of sexual selection traits in the human female means that something is very askewey about the mate selection systems we humans have going on now. This is an evolutionary own-goal, because, as we have seen, when the males are in control of the sexual selection, they select females that:
a) might not be able to give birth
b) show as few signs as possible that they are fertile
Indeed, males positively de-select and ridicule females who can provide the physical evidence of being fertile: the droopy breasts, the saggy tummy skin, the large vagina.
However, when males do talk about their own evolutionary psychological sexually selected traits, (and they do) they tend to talk about them in positive terms: how intelligent they are, how funny they are, and how good they are at language. The section on Darwin’s Descent and his theories on human sexual selection will give you a jolly good idea of what males thought of themselves at a time (1871) when they pretty much had total control of mate choice.
We might find it in our hearts to allow that nice Mr Darwin a bit of leg-room on the social norms of the time. However, there are other evolutionary psychologists who have not fallen far from the Darwinian tree, and they don’t have the excuse of social context that Darwin did. Might I suggest a sternly-worded email as a preference to full out physical violence against them? Better still, feel free to use any or all of my suggestions in this essay as verbal ammunition to any male you feel has it coming to him.
Back to the point. The point is that patriarchy has seriously screwed with human sexual selection, particularly for women. Monogamy reduces the genetic variation in a woman’s offspring, for example. If we were looking to get the best out of the next generation, we would have a different father for each of our children. Can you imagine the face of the social worker you told that rationalisation to? “My children all have different fathers because I wanted to maximise their genetic diversity”. Yet it is an evolutionary fitness at species level – the more the variety, the more likely the species will survive, even in a changing environment, because one of them will have the mutant genes that are ideally suited to any change. A bit like the X-Men: they all have different superpowers. But if you try that tactic, you are likely to be labelled as a bad mother, a slut, used goods, or mentally instable in some extreme cases. That is, society’s norms work against female naturally selected fitnesses, such as a large vagina, small breasts, and children by different, unidentified fathers.
What if, before patriarchy, we could give birth pretty easily because we had nice big vaginas? What if we could have that for our daughters and our daughters’ daughters? So maybe they will never have to run away from lions, but maybe if they had smaller boobs, they could outrun….well, any predator, like a rapist…..without having to hold on to them, or giving themselves a black eye in the process.
For me, it is a serious feminist issue regardless of future generations: I want to be proud of my fertility and I want signs of fertility in all women to be celebrated rather than hidden away. I want issues of female physiognomy, cognition, and selected traits to be researched with the rigour and gravity of male physiognomy. And not only because it is a feminist travesty that female traits are ignored, but because evolutionary psychology is a gender-biased joke in the meantime, where males use its findings to claim that “boys will be boys” and they have evolved to be led by their penis, so that’s all right then. Rubbish. They have a head three times bigger than proto-humans. They are evolved to be led by the head on top of their shoulders, and they are evolved to be sexually selected by females. Therefore, any decent scientific enquiry should include a serious investigation of the ontology of the selecting gender to ascertain what type of male is sexually preferred by females.
Instead, the debates which are acceptable and popular in evolutionary psychology tend to be the ones that reinforce the theories laid down by Darwin in 1871. The ones which contradict the canon and strike out for freedom of female sexuality tend to be ignored or laughed at. I tell you this from experience. A discussion on what Darwin said is the subject of the next chapter, and if you don’t think it is biased in favour of males, you can email me and tell me why. I would love to hear that explanation.
I use the word ‘androcentric’ a lot. It means centred around males. I use it instead of misogynistic because it has less of a value bias, it is a less common word and therefore an excuse to get into an evolutionary psychological debate at the least encouragement (and it is easier to type). I believe that Darwin is androcentric, and that the research edifice which has grown up around the Origin of Species, and more recently the Descent of Man, is androcentric. The worst part is that Darwin’s core hypothesis is brilliant, with the simplicity and beauty of good theory: part of being male is displaying sexually selected traits, and part of being female is selecting them.
It is my humble opinion that there are not a lot of women researchers in evolutionary psychology because a lot of it is just so hard to take without the desire to punch some researchers in the nuts and asking them what you ever did to them to deserve such bullshit being said about you.
This is both perfectly understandable and a crying shame. I suggest we start with the core theory as defined above, and see where this would lead from a feminist perspective. The aim of this essay is ultimately to initiate the discussion about a female-centred companion to the current androcentric model of evolution where both viewpoints are taken in tandem. It’s a tall order, but it’s a start.
Right, if you are still up for it after that, get your grinding teeth at the ready, we start the chronicle of evolutionary psychological theory-building with its daddy - Charles Darwin – and his lesser known book, The Descent of Man.
The purpose of this first chapter is to get you in the mood. It will attempt to provide you with a simple, layperson’s flyby of how evolution works, how sexual selection fits in to evolution, and why feminists might care about it. It lays down the foundation for future chapters in this essay, suggesting that the canon of evolutionary psychology as currently practiced does not adequately address female issues. Instead the focus of research is skewed towards the maintenance of mainstream social sexual norms. The argument made in this opening chapter will suggest that the methodology and epistemology of evolutionary psychology is unnecessarily narrow, only serving to entrench the traditional androcentric viewpoints of sexual selection as originally expounded by Darwin in the Descent of Man. It suggests that more qualitative and relativistic use of research materials would be useful, particularly serving a female-centric ‘companion’ epistemology to complement the current androcentric canon.
This essay not only borders on the irreverent, it deliberately seeks to be both provocative and contrary. The style in which it is written has developed from this viewpoint, which deviates considerably from mainstream academic writing. It is highly subjective and does not shy from developing hypotheses for which there is no existing body of research. Indeed, it is argued that gaping holes exist in the current body of research that have been proactively evaded up to this point, and this should be addressed, even if in an irreverent and subjective manner in the first instance. Ultimately, I would rather it was readable than pure in form of presentation.
The chapter begins by my layman’s understanding of the relevant primary theories. These theories are threaded through with exemplars, some of which are common in the mainstream debates, and some that have occurred to me as I have spent time studying the subject. Hopefully they will provide a mental visual stimulus which will aid understanding of the concepts, and indeed provide a clear and present appreciation of my opinions of the concepts themselves.
Finally a spoiler alert: words of a personal and sexual nature will be used.
Evolution: More than just Surviving
What evolutionary theory boils down to is how well an organism can deal with the time and place of their existence. Of course, it is first and foremost about surviving, because there is not a lot of point in debating anything else if surviving comes to an end. However, evolution is also about ‘getting on’ in life: about how we make the most out of our circumstances. This is important. Sure, evolution discusses the survival of the fittest to survive, but it is also deeply involved in looking at the hierarchies of existence. So evolution looks at how organisms can avoid being eaten by predators, or can find other organisms to eat at a species level. However, it also looks at how individuals within a species compete with each other for the easiest life.
Now, evolutionary processes can be divided into different types and sections, and we will obviously be doing quite a lot of that throughout this essay. At this point, the division is between natural selection and sexual selection, because this division echoes the difference between survival and having an easier life.
By and large, natural selection is the fight and flight survival stuff. You know the kind of thing: not being eaten by the lions and bringing home the bacon. How we get along with other species in our environment in such a way as to survive another day. However, as the old joke goes, surviving another day does not mean that we have to be faster than the lions. We just have to be faster than the slowest person trying to outrun the lions. As far as I am aware, lions do not have some weird sense of dignity whereby they feel that they have to go after the fastest prey. No, we tend to assume they will go for the prey that involves the least amount of effort. So we are assuming that if someone else is slower than us, then they are the one getting eaten.
This is a good piece of information to know, by and large. However, it is information that is a bit off to one side of the natural selection of running away from lions per se. It is more about how you can compare yourself to others of your own species, and the individual’s chances of survival relative to one another. I could be Linford Christie, but if I am the only one being chased by the lion, I am toast. On the other hand I could be a little old lady, but if I am competing with a six month old baby, I still might be able to outrun them. So in a sense, natural selection is absolute: it is the equipment you come into the environment with that defines what problems you are going to have to solve. Sexual selection is more of a relative issue: it is defined by the quality of the set of equipment you have compared to someone else in your species.
Now sexual selection is usually defined as dealing specifically with the organism’s ability to attract a mate for coitus: you may be able to outrun the lions (or at least outrun other people trying to outrun lions) but unless you get pregnant, give birth and keep the child safe until they reach sexual maturity themselves, you have not yet passed on your genes. As far as it goes, this is true. Whether or not we agree with Richard Dawkins when he says that genes pro-actively seek out opportunities to reproduce themselves, we can all pretty much agree that differences between one generation and the next is the crux of evolution. So choosing between potential mates for coitus influences the direction of evolution. So far so good.
Evolution and Academia: Strange Bedfellows
However, the way we investigate the process choosing between potential mates for coitus is heaped choc full of social stuff and human assumptions. In fact, the reason I personally find evolutionary psychology so damn fascinating is that taking away the social and human stuff is so infernally tricky to do. Some of the assumptions we make about sexual selection and mate selection are downright misogyny. Sorry guys, but read the chapter on Darwin’s opinions before you object to that. Besides, some of the other assumptions we make are based on our sheer humanity: the level of understanding we have of the connection between coitus and childbirth, our ability to communicate our understanding of how we got here and, indeed, our understanding of the process of evolution itself.
Perhaps most vitally, our ability to project past and present trends into the future can cloud our hypotheses on the hows and whys of evolution. We assume basic information such as the connection between coitus and pregnancy and childbirth. Sure, as an adult it might seem ridiculous to you that I would question whether all organisms know that babies are the result of coitus. On the other hand, we all know of children who have asked where babies come from. Why don’t children automatically know where babies come from? Young children manage to understand how to acquire their native language, so they have the cognitive capacity to ingest information and to express their own thoughts. Why isn’t one of these thoughts “When I grow up I will get a mate and we will have penetrative coitus and that will produce offspring”? They don’t think that because that information does not come hard-wired at birth. On the contrary, it is information that they acquire through social interaction. Usually through social interaction adults try to keep from them for as long as possible under the heading of “innocence of childhood”. Now before I go any further, I am not suggesting that children should be sexualised. No, no, no. What I am saying is that there is no inherent, natural state of understanding the relationship between coitus and babies. The only reason children lose that state of “innocence” is through social interaction. In other words, we may develop an attraction to physical contact with others as we grow, but we do not automatically understand the consequences.
This is the kind of assumption I am referring to: where we assume that we always knew a bit of information, even if we have some evidence to suggest to the contrary. We as humans are so damn clever that we sometimes forget that we have developed bodies of knowledge that we have to pass on. More, we all accept the knowledge as so basic and obvious that we believe them to be universally known and applicable.
The problem with this, of course, is that if we find evidence to the contrary, we tend to dismiss it, or try to explain it in such a way as to fit in with our assumptions. Take the Virgin Mary. She didn’t really have a spontaneous pregnancy – it is a fairy tale, right? It is an analogy of her spirituality. Because spontaneous birth without coitus is not possible in humans. I’ll leave that one with you. You may like to ponder it or you may like to just toss it to the four winds. It’s up to you. All I am saying is that pondering it can lead to some interesting trains of thought. And that hopefully I can throw some more at you during the course of the essay. You have been warned.
Awww. Do I have to?
In the meantime, we are going to assume that – in the normal course of events – if you want a baby you have to have penetrative coitus. With a man. This isn’t LGBT biased, it is biology. I am going to discuss homosexuality and its function later, but in the meantime, for purposes of this present discussion, successful reproduction involves penile penetration to ejaculation without contraception. (Contraception is a big deal in evolutionary psychological research – and at times laugh out loud funny – so there is a whole section on it later.).
In some quarters, penile penetration to male ejaculation is known as “real sex”, and everything else is “foreplay”. “Sex” is a tricksy word, and it can cover a multitude of nuance. So what I am going to do is call penetration to male ejaculation “coitus”. I am doing this to denote that penetration to male ejaculation is only one particular form of sexual activity, rather than the be-all and end-all. Granted, it is the one that can get you pregnant (ceteris paribus) and since evolution is about reproduction, it is an important and central concept for this essay. Besides, continuing to call it penile penetration to male ejaculation is a mouthful, and that is a play on words too far! Let’s just go with coitus.
Oh, and the physical bits we own are denoted by the word “gender” rather than “sex”. So, for example, I am a member of the female gender, rather than the female sex. This removes any confusion between the act of coitus and the state of being in a gendered body. Yeah, it might be a really pedantic, nit-picky point to make, but I am making it anyway. Sure, there are a lot of other, much worse gender-based words that could be used, and you can use them if you like. I choose clarity, and I try to get as close to a well-reasoned argument as I can muster. From this point, we can elaborate to concepts such as gender specificity and gender differentiation without constantly evoking the spectre of the act of coitus by using the word “sex”.
Right, with those caveats and preferences in the bag, let’s start the good stuff. The way evolution works in biological terms is not up for debate here. It might be the case that in biology research circles this is a very simplistic explanation, but all I want to do is to pass on my interpretation of the mechanics in broad brush strokes.
How Evolution Works –ish: The View from the Laity
The basic principles of evolutionary change are:
- Mutation
- Genetic drift
- Recombination
- Migration
- Selection
Mutation
Mutations are the basic fuel of evolution. Some random part of the makeup of the organism changes from one generation to the other for reasons known only unto itself. Could be big, could be small, but a mutation can change the balance of the fitness of the individual organism and its environment. This can happen in both directions: it could result in the individual organism being better suited for the environment, or it could put it at a disadvantage. Having a deep understanding of mutations would really require knowing everyone’s genome, knowing how much of that genome changes per individual per generation, knowing how the environment changes and measuring what the outcome of the interaction is. Easy for me to say. Difficult to do in practice.
For mutations to be influential in evolutionary terms, you really need to pass them on, and this means that they could do with being non-fatal, and they would benefit from increasing the attractiveness of the mutant to the opposite gender. So, if the mutation means that you have a bigger nose, you might end up with better oxygen intake resulting in being able to run faster. That is obviously a natural advantage against the lions and against the other people running away from the lions. However, if the mutated nose is considered to be ugly by the opposite gender, then you lower your chances of having children. Swings and roundabouts.
Drift
Genetic drift is how the whole population of individuals changes over time, and the types of physical elements that become more or less prevalent. So if we stick with the case of big noses, a drift towards big noses would mean that you wouldn’t have a unique big nose that would give you a sexual selection advantage over others of your species who didn’t. On the contrary, it is more likely to be something like the quality of the environment where having a big nose was a good idea for everyone, so most people tended towards having one.
Drift is possible as a sexual selection where all the females of the species get together and decide on a few males to have coitus with, rejecting the rest of the males. This is called lekking: more later. If the males selected to be coitally active in a lek have a specific attribute, it will be passed on. If the active males do not have an attribute it wont. Even if the attribute is present in the majority of males. So females in a lek can eliminate and initiate large drifts depending on their lekking choices, and they can do so in a single generation. (Figure one). However, a caveat to this is that they have to work with what they have. Much as we might like to, wishing for attributes will not make them magically appear.
Now, evolutionary psychology is a circuitous subject and it is difficult to discuss any part of it without knowing other parts of it. Sometimes I will put in more than one explanation for clarity, or I may have to leave an explanation for later. This is one of those times.
There are a couple of things I would like to put in here for future reference. First is the homosexual thang. You may hear a lot of b/s about how a tendency towards same gender relationships are evolutionary dead ends, and at a purely genetic level, that is true: there will be no direct offspring. However, homosexuality hasn’t died out, and that is weird, isn’t it? I mean, at the very least, a “homosexuality” gene set is a tenacious bugger. It keeps on popping back up, even when we don’t sexually select for it. In fact, between you and me, the persistence of homosexuality is a bit of a fly in the ointment of evolutionary theorising. For example, Geoffrey Miller in his book “The Mating Mind” goes on at length about how great men are and how everything they ever did is attractive to females. He even suggests that some males might only be good enough for a few orgasms rather than a baby-father. Yet homosexuality is dealt with summarily in a page or so. Basically he shrugs his shoulders at it, and says he has no idea what homosexuality is doing keeping on coming back and making his nice theory more awkward.
Now I don’t know about you, but I find homosexuality a bit “Miss Marple”, and I am a bit perplexed as to why evolutionary model builders don’t find it a fascinating puzzle*. Hello! A sexual preference which is subject to drift in every generation, yet it pops up again in the next generation, again to be subject to drift, but lo! The next generation has a percentage of homosexual individuals. It isn’t a permanent evolutionary mutation because it is not passed on to the next generation (and we know this because there are lesbian baby-mothers and gay baby-fathers who produce heterosexual children), and it isn’t a proper drift because it refuses to lie down and become extinct. That’s fabulous, you tenacious sexual preference, you. Oh, I am absolutely going to be going there later.
*Well I have a few ideas, but they all include words like “blinkered”; “arrogant”; and “arse”. I don’t know these people personally – they may genuinely believe that their theory is good to go without an explanation for homosexuality and be an absolute charmer to have afternoon tea with. So we are going with ‘benefit of the doubt’.
Recombination
Ok, technical hats at the ready, we are going to talk alleles and Mendel. It is not going to be uber-technical, simply because it is not my specialism and I can’t, but it is important to have a basic grasp of it.
Ok, so an allele is one of the pair of options open to a gene. There are two basic variations: both alleles are the same as each other or they differ from each other. When they are the same, then the gene will express itself the same way in the offspring as it does in the parent. Let’s use garden peas to stand in for alleles for the time being, so that we get the general hang of it. Garden peas are the poster children for alleles, and they are tasty and good for you. What’s not to like? The peas will enlighten you. Here we go.
So, for example, if you breed garden peas and you only have green peas, you will get green pea seeds. If you have green peas and yellow peas, then the offspring could be one or the other. One yellow and one green parent pea could produce a yellow or a green baby pea. With me so far? Ok.
Imagine your genes are parent peas (you saw that coming, didn’t you?). Each gene has two forms, they can be alike or they can be different. Where they are alike, there is no problem: like mother like daughter. However, where the parent peas are different, it becomes just plain annoyingly complicated. Where the parents are yellow and green, the baby will be yellow or green, sure, but the chances of being a green or a yellow baby pea is not fifty/fifty. One of the pea alleles is a bit of an extrovert, and the other one a bit of an introvert. The extrovert is called ‘dominant’ and the introvert is called ‘recessive’. The baby pea will take on the characteristics of the extrovert allele. However, the baby pea also gets given the introvert version, but it sits in its bedroom all day reading books and listening to music.
So if the baby pea gets a dominant green and a recessive yellow allele, it will be green. However, it still carries the potential to be yellow. Still with me? The baby pea with different parent peas can pass on its potential yellowness to the next generation, even if it is green as grass itself. It is a closet yellower. It doesn’t look any less green than the pure greens, but the yellow lurks like the Addams family butler.
This is where Mendel comes in. He bred peas, and his findings led to two principles:
1. The Principle of Segregation
2. The Principle of Independent Assortment
The principle of segregation is basically an accounting system, where the baby pea gets one allele from mummy and one from daddy. Otherwise, the baby pea would have double the number of alleles her parents had, and that is quickly going to get out of hand.
In the principle of independent assortment, each pair of alleles has no direct influence on any other pair of alleles for, say, the colour of the pea flower. So if one parent was green with purple flowers, and the other was yellow with white flowers, baby pea could be yellow with purple flowers. It’s basically saying you can mix and match.
This is not evolution all by itself: the baby pea might be new, but it is only working with the old alleles it inherits. In order to get evolution proper, we need to add in mutation, where new alleles are created and become dominant, and where some alleles get lost through drift. For example, if all the peas with all the yellow alleles get eaten rather than replanted, then there are no more yellow peas, just green ones. The yellow peas are extinct. They are ex-peas. What recombination of alleles does do is to provide variety that the rest of the evolutionary forces can choose from. Sometimes, the evolutionary forces all choose the one type of allele (i.e. life eats all the yellow peas) and when this happens, all the individuals in the species have the same trait. This is known as being fixed within a population. Like a red wine stain on a white carpet, a fixed trait is very difficult to shift. This is usually because the trait does a decent job, under the circumstances. May as well pour the whole damn bottle of wine onto the carpet and hey presto – a red carpet. It is possible for a new mutation to come along which does a better job, but it tends to have its work cut out.
However, remember the recessive alleles? It might look like life has eaten all the yellow peas, but you never know – there might be some yellow alleles hiding away just waiting for the right set of circumstances to become dominant.
Now, as I was mentioning earlier, recombination has a bit of a tricky time explaining the persistence of homosexuality in a population. My favourite one is that there is a pair of alleles: one gay and one straight, and the straight one dominates most of the time so that the species doesn’t go extinct. However, everyone has a gay streak in them: an allele that could potentially decide to get off its behind, come out of the recessive closet, and audition for musicals (I know I know – stereotype. Just let me have the one mistake and I will make up for it later). The reason for the existence of a gay allele is something we will go into later, but for now, I just wanted to put that point in there so that we could all let it settle and see whether we could live with that idea. Yes I am saying that we all have a little bit of gay in us. It’s a theory – try it on.
Migration
The short version of migration is that stuff moves about. Even plant seeds are blown to the four winds, and end up in different locations where there might be different kinds of seeds to play mummies and daddies with. Playing mummies and daddies with new kinds of seeds makes even more kinds of recombinations. Hoorah! Note that new combinations of mummies and daddies are viewed in theoretical terms as a good thing. It may be the case that a particular mummy and daddy might produce a really good version, but this is not guaranteed, nor is it necessarily repeatable. So although you might be fabulous, your little brother or sister might be better suited to the environment in five years time. Take for example the French Revolution. If you were a noble parent offspring fifty years before the Revolution, you were on to a good thing. If you were born a couple of days ahead of it, the outlook might be a bit bleaker. The upshot is that having children by different fathers is not an evil, wicked thing to be doing. On the contrary, different fathers means that you are hedging your bets on fit offspring. Remember this the next time you hear some woman decried for having children from more than one father. And just wait until we get to Sperm Wars. Taking the different fathers hypothesis on now will set you up in a good place for dealing with the down low on female biological fitness later. Trust me on this one.
So, migration introduces the environment as an element in evolution. The baby pea might end up in a nice, organically rich field with loads of pals to play with, or it could end up on the pavement, and get squished underfoot. Spookily enough peas don’t grow well on pavements whilst squished. Pavement pea ends up at the wrong end of an evolutionary drift, field pea sends its allele combination into the next generation.
Migration also introduces the notion that the environment is a form of inheritance, as well as genes. To demonstrate this, let’s look at pea weights. Let’s imagine that the baby pea has to cross the pavement to get to the other side where the nice organically rich field is. Let’s also say that light peas travel further on the wind. In this case, light peas are more likely to reproduce than heavy peas, because heavy peas land on the pavement, and we all know where that ends. Of course, before the pavement had been built, heavy peas might have reproduced in the dirt the pavement was, but now that is only a fond memory in pea myths and legends when big fat peas were in their prime. Only light peas are successful peas these days of pavements. Goddam pavements spoil everything, changing stuff, and encouraging peas to go to Weightwatchers if they are to reproduce. Wow, that is sounding too familiar for comfort – I am going to stop there. Suffice to say one day you can be a fine example of a pea, next day you are utterly inadequate. It all depends on the environment you inherit.
Before I move on, though, I want to add the changing preferences of the opposite gender as an environmental selection. I want to suggest that, depending on where you live in the world, or the age you lived in would go part of the way to deciding whether or not you are good reproductive material. Just like the pea, Western advertising suggests that women should be light. There are some males that like “something to hold on to”, but light females are generally preferred hereabouts. Like the environment, attitudes towards the other gender can change, and they can squish you when they do. The upshot of this is that I have very little faith in the notion that there is one perfect model of beauty or fitness. This will become important as we go along.
Selection
So there is natural selection and there is sexual selection. Natural selection is the fighting and the flighting you are probably well and truly familiar with. Sexual selection is the “third F”: fornicating (yes, I do use the other F in private). In other words, if you put the two types of selection together, you have to stay alive long enough to get laid, and you have to be attractive enough for someone to want to do the horizontal stuff with you. It also helps if you can keep the offspring alive long enough to get to puberty.
Now my understanding of my genetics classes was that evolution is all the above stuff put together – that’s what makes it a fascinating topic. In my opinion, this is not wrong. However, if you try and butt evolutionary psychology up against genetics, one of the results is a bit unlikely. Let me run it past you.
I can do what now?
In evolutionary psychology, females select males on the grounds of the fitness of their traits. They do this because they want their offspring to have those same traits. However, if we look at recombination, we see that the traits are constructed by the dominant, extrovert alleles, whilst the introvert alleles are playing Joy Division. Ok, so we are not selecting for genes, we are selecting for the dominant allele. Big deal. What’s the difference? Well, I think it is a big ask for females to look at the dominant alleles and be able to decide which ones will be passed on as dominant alleles, and what the recessive allele may be like, and whether it has a good chance of becoming dominant in the next generation. As far as I can make out, the current reason for dominance and recession decisions is “chance”. That is, the alleles decide between themselves, and are too damn lazy to tell geneticists the rules of the dominance game.
In short,
a) If females do have an inbuilt ‘radar’ for potential dominant alleles, would a geneticist please point to it?
b) If my mate selections are anything to go by, I think I may have had a radar bypass at some point before puberty.
In other words, evolutionary psychologists start saying that the sexual selection for traits in my children is down to me, and I have no idea how that is supposed to work. I especially have no idea how that is supposed to work if you add in the complication of dominant and recessive alleles. What part of my brain is responsible for making these calculations? Could we make a cognitive model out of the process the way we do with memory or attention or perception? And if not, why not? Now to a certain extent, I have an answer ready: it is a methodological problem. Basically, evolutionary psychological research as an academic activity is only done in a certain way. I happen not to like the way it is done, and believe it is totally inadequate. People who get the results they want from the way it is done now will disagree. Of course they will. However, I would argue that methodology is a feminist issue in evolutionary psychology, and I would humbly ask you, dear reader, to keep in mind as we go along that the answers researchers produce depend on the questions they ask and how they go about finding out the answers. The shorthand word I will be using for this is ‘epistemology’. Epistemology is basically a polysyllable for ‘valid knowledge’ on a given subject. I believe that the epistemology of mainstream evolutionary psychology is manipulative, extremely narrow, and downright silly. Here again, I will weave this in as I go along and point it out as and when it seems appropriate. Don’t worry if you forget – I will remind you.
In the meantime, assuming we all have a decent grasp of roughly how evolution works, and what natural selection is, let’s look at sexual selection in a bit more detail.
Definition of Sexual Selection Criteria as currently used in the Evolutionary Psychology Industry (Bluffer’s Guide Version)
So to recap slightly, in evolutionary model-building, natural selections are traits increase the chances of an organism surviving in its environment. You know the kind of stuff – running away from big bad things, catching food, staying warm, and so on. Sexual selections are traits which increase the chances of any organism attracting a mate and reproducing.
So the first we need to do is find a way of telling what is a natural selection and what is a sexual selection. This can be quite tricky, because some traits fit both natural and sexual selection categories, such as good teeth. Teeth are good for biting and chewing, but a lovely smile can be very attractive. So far so good.
However, if we look at the example of teeth, whiter teeth are more likely to crumble quicker than more naturally yellow teeth because they are chalkier than yellow teeth. Teeth that are good for chewing and biting over a long period time would be more yellow. Whiter teeth may be less practical, but we might find them more attractive than yellow teeth. So yellow teeth would be a better natural selection and white teeth are a better sexual selection.
Sexual selections don’t have to run contrary to natural selection, but the way evolutionary psychology has developed, anything which is advantageous to the running away and the hunting and the fighting are all classified as natural selections, even if they are both natural and sexual good selections. Sexual selections tend to be classified as the stuff that runs contrary to natural selection: that is, it makes the hunting and the fighting more difficult. And that’s not all. The full list goes something like this.
A sexual selection:
- does not have to be present or fully developed at birth
- must present by around puberty
- is sexually attractive to the female in around 80% of species (we choose it)
- is present in the male organism in around 80% of cases (they have it)
- is present only in one gender (only one of us has it)
- is not covered by ‘fitness’ to survive in the environment (e.g. eyes can be cute, but they are built for seeing primarily)
- could be viewed as a handicap, decreasing chances of survival (e.g. a male peacock is the opposite of camouflaged, so easy for predators to find)
- may have no obvious adaptive value (we can’t think of a practical use for it)
- tends to go to extremes of development which can ultimately result in extinction (they get so extreme that they endanger our health)
- tends to have a wide bandwidth of variations in a population (there are a lot of different types)
- can have an impact in a very short space of time (as little as one generation in extreme cases)
- currently seems to be any trait that doesn’t fit neatly into another category, or doesn’t fit a rationalist or adaptationalist model (see chapter three for different kinds of theories).
The last criterion is, of course, not one the way it is generally described in text books. But there has been a tendency in the research domain over the last ten years or so to ascribe sexual selection status to any attribute which appears to be irrational. Rationality, on the other hand, tends to be associated with natural selection. There are a great many sexual selections which we can’t yet explain, and it is true that females are under no obligation whatsoever to find rational and sensible attributes sexy. Indeed, it is likely that most of us - at some time - have known what the sensible, rational choice would be, but we have been irresistibly drawn to the lustful choice instead. So we know that some choices are more logical and sensible than others, and we know that irrationality exists in sexual selection.
However, it is an interesting little niggle that there has been an association between female choices and irrationality for a very long time. Hands up anyone who is not aware that males consider themselves to be the more rational gender, and females to be the more irrational gender. We are, it is claimed, more prone to be governed by our emotions than males. So it would make sense to a bunch of male evolutionary psychologists that all these irrational traits have ultimately come from some silly girly choice in the dim and distant past, whereas the sensible choices such as opposable thumbs are the rational, manly choices of hunters and fighters who need to make tools and intercontinental nuclear missiles.
However, the irrational choice is not a purely female prerogative, no matter who is telling you that it is. We know this because of patriarchy. In a classic of example of being hoisted by one’s own petard, the social hierarchy of males being in supreme power and control over female sexuality has thrown up some male sexual selections of its own, leaving a trail of traits to show exactly what males have preferred in a female mate. So do you want to make some guesses now as to what these might be, and see if you are right later down the line? Got some? On we go.
This, of course, is the downside of absolute power and control: the powerful tend to express their wildest dreams, and insist on having their environment work exactly as they want it. I view this as one of the few upsides of patriarchy: we know what men want because they have been insisting on getting it for too long. Better, they have insisted on passing on their daughters from father to husband for long enough for sexual selection to take hold and show itself in some sexually selected physical traits in women.
For example, large, ornamental breasts could be a sexually selected trait by the male.
Large breasts do not augment breast-feeding, and therefore serve very little purpose other than to attract males. This suggests that males have preferentially sexually selected females with large breasts simply because they have an irrational desire for them. let me guess – you are one for one so far. Gold star for you!
The notion of a small waist and flat stomach is an interesting one. We will be discussing the “Hip to Waist Ratio” (I kid you not) in later chapters because it has played quite the role in some research projects. But just for now, we are using it as an example of a sexual selection by a male which is irrational. What we do is we look at the bluffer’s guide checklist for sexual selections, and we ask questions of the trait in question.
The argument goes like this:
A stomach which is tight and flat is a contra-indicator of fertility, and a flabbier stomach shows a female’s fertility, as the skin post-pregnancy has been stretched, and tends to sag more than that of a female who has not been pregnant. A small waist could be considered a sexual selection by the male because at best it hides fertility, and at worst suggests a female may be infertile. The same is true of pert breasts where the nipples tend to point straight ahead rather than droop as they do after birth.
So, male preferences for pert breasts, small waists and flat stomachs are irrational sexual selections by the male. You get the idea? They have nothing to do with how well the woman will survive in the environment, and in some cases they could be a hindrance (such as running away from lions impeded by large breasts (the women have the large breasts not the lions)). They (the breasts, not the lions) only appear in the female of the species, and they are not there at birth, but develop at puberty. Big breasts do not equate to more milk to feed an infant with, so they really have no practical value for survival purposes. They also have a wide bandwidth. This means that there is a large variety of sizes of breasts. A survival trait tends to hone in on a narrow range of options which best fit the job they are built for. A bit like the range of Apple Macs (where do I get my royalty cheque?)
So we can see that if we ask a few questions based on the check list provided earlier, we can make a good guess as to whether or not it is a sexual selection. Breasts size is subject to sexual selection by the male. That is, males select females based on the size of their breasts. This is not a rational choice based on assisting the female in her survival prospects, but is purely based on lust. That is the point of a sexual selection: it attracts the opposite gender. The members of the species with the most attractive traits – such as large breasts – get more attention and more offers of coitus regardless and sometimes even contrary to the evidence of fertility (yes, again, I know, I know, I am not telling you anything you didn’t know already).
Now there are problems with breasts being sexually selected. Indeed, there is a problem with males sexually selecting anything about females at all. The following argument on the investment in offspring is offered often with glee by male evolutionary psychologists. Check it out:
A woman who has coitus during pregnancy is only still going to produce one child every nine months. There is no way of increasing the rate of production. A man who has coitus with other women while his wife is pregnant stands a chance of doubling his output. He can’t speed up production of any one female, but he can have more than one production line running at the same time. So large breasts are only any good to the woman up to the point of pregnancy. After that, they revert to a natural selection, where they are used to feed baby. So although a woman could pull any man she wants with a big pair of breasts, and has a wider range of choice between males offering sex, the big boobs don’t allow her to speed up the rate at which she can produce children – it is a fixed term.
A male, on the other hand, could speed up his rate of production of offspring if he has traits which are luscious to females. Evolutionaries (like missionaries, but with a spiritual calling to persuade themselves males are superior. Not the position…for now….although we will get there, too), are mostly male, and they like to fantasise that they could have a different woman every half hour or so, because that is their maximum physical limit for sperm production.
Back in the real world he would more likely be looking at two or three children at the most per nine months, because, frankly, most men are average looking. That’s why it is called average. However, the notion of having more than one production line going at one time feeds the deeply loved notion that the world will be populated by his descendants and he wins (we are not sure what he wins, but he wins. It is like the “global race” but with offspring instead of all the money). This is where the male fantasy of a harem of women comes from. Of course, much as males claim the harem is similar to Fordism and is all about maximising the production line, we know it is about power and control, guys. Give it up. But like all good stories, it has a kernel of truth. Males can produce children in parallel almost to the limit of his physical endurance. Females are restricted to one a year, pretty much. Which is a bitch in a pub debate when you can’t think of a good come-back.
We have seen that the production line principle means that having a really effective sexual selection – like killer mammaries – does not do anything for females in evolutionary terms, because it doesn’t spread the woman’s genes any further or faster than they do already. But males, well, having a face like Brad Pitt is going to have a superb impact on your chances of getting laid more often. As a male, the more you get laid, the more children are going to have your genes. So it makes sense that most of the sexual selections in the world are found in the male (84% or so depending on who you talk to) of the species. It’s the males who have the big brash tail feathers, the elaborate songs, or the innate desire to interior design (in the case of the bower bird). And they have them because it makes a huge difference to the number of offspring they can have.
So the male rate of offspring production is much more flexible than the female’s. This flexibility means that it makes more sense for males to have the sexual selections, because it will have an impact on the number of offspring they can have. If you can’t change the rate of offspring production, there is no point in having a sexual selection. It’s like having a turbo button on a car dashboard of a car that doesn’t have a turbo charger.
Like passing a watermelon
Let me take this line of thought a bit further. Now, we will discuss runaway sexual selection in more depth later, but in the meantime, basically, it means that the opposite gender will select for it, even if the result may be fatal. Let me run this past you:
If a male selected a female sexual partner on the grounds of being able to reproduce his genes, then one might imagine that the primary selection criteria would be the woman’s ability to give birth to live young. That is the rational choice for reproduction. Job done. Now, if this were the case, males could reasonably be expected to select females on the basis of her proven capacity to become pregnant and bear children. So, they would select the females with external signs of having given birth already: flabby tummy skin where it had stretched during late pregnancy, and droopy breasts which have had obvious use in feeding a child. Mothers will know the sorts of things I mean.
But human males are attracted to females for attributes which are essentially the opposite of fertility attributes. Let’s take waist to hip ratio. A man goes pretty much straight up and down, and his waist is not that much smaller than his hips. A woman, on the other hand, is curvy, with a waist smaller than her hips. So this only appears in one of the genders. It becomes obvious during puberty, and there is no adaptive or survival value to a small waist. (Yes, obesity is a problem, but it is not universally true that women with smaller waist to hip ratio outlive women with a bit of a tummy and smaller hips). Here again, going through the sexual selection checklist, waist to hip ratio is looking like a sexual selection of the male by the female. This is getting to be a bit of a habit.
Let me take this argument a stage further, and press on to look at another form of sexual selection which works in much the same way for the same reasons: the preference for virgin females. This is also a sexual selection by males which could reduce his chances of producing offspring. Yes, virginity is only a temporary state, and it is not a trait like big boobs, but it is still a sexual selection because it is selected preferentially by males.
Ok, so let’s imagine you lived in a society where virginity is necessary for marriage. If you lose your virginity on a wild night out before you are married, you may get pregnant once, but then the rest of the men will shun you for marriage. If you are not married, you may not have any more mates, and that means no more children. On the other hand if you are a virgin at marriage, and marriage lasts more than one year, then you will have a mate who could impregnate you year in and year out. At best (or in my opinion, my worst nightmare) you could give birth to perhaps twenty children before you a) died of exhaustion; b) hit menopause. So the virgin in this scenario has the potential for more childbearing than the non-virgin, and that is the definition of evolutionary success – lots of little ‘you’s in the next generation. In other words, males take the risk of acquiring a female who is infertile instead of acquiring one who is proven to be able to give birth. Why does he do this?
Although we might be a bit more liberal than we used to be, any culture which has words like “slut” or the equivalent holds the same view at some level. (By the way, while you are having that pub argument, try replacing the word “slut” with the phrase “proponent of genetic biodiversity”: means roughly the same).
But of course, you would expect that this type of value judgement of female promiscuity wouldn’t hold any sway in evolutionary psychology, where there are scientists involved, for goodness sake. They know how to do statistical analysis, and get papers published in peer review journals with very few pictures and very small type. They produce the kind of writing that would send small children to sleep if you read it to them (yes, I have done this to my offspring, and it does work). Big words, technical jargon, genetics, professorships. They have letters after their name like PhD to show how much they know about it. Surely they deal in evidence, right? Well sort of, but I refer you to the methodological problems hinted at earlier. The epistemology of evolutionary psychology ignores some issues in preference for other more convenient issues.
The preferred areas of study tend to be more based in social concepts than in the validity of a physical trait. So they say things like “men prefer small waists”, but sort of bypass the ironic elements of hidden fertility potential we just discussed. They just seem to take it as read that if males say they prefer small waists, there must be an evolutionary reason in there somewhere. Of course, if they tried to explain WHY men prefer small waists, they might end up with the conclusion that males are irrational, and that is not likely to appear in a peer reviewed journal article. So rather than say that they are just irrational, they either ignore the paradox or make up some bull that is difficult to disprove.
You might argue that –as men – they would know from experience what men like. True. But it is not rigorous investigation with scientific principles. I like digestive biscuits. They are not good for my evolutionary chances of reproducing, because they are doing no damn good in the fight for a small waist (and shockingly, dear reader, I don’t give a rat’s ass). This does not mean that I should write a journal article debating how evolutionarily fit the digestive biscuit is. I could ask a hundred thousand women in a survey about their digestive biscuit habits and relate it to the number of offers of sex they get. I could get the result that women who eat digestives get more offers of sex than those who eat chocolate fudge cake. Would that make the digestive biscuit a sexual selection? No.
However, it would make the digestive biscuit a handicap in the achievement of a sexually selected trait such as a small waist. This double negative would ironically mean that you would be able to get the saggy tummy associated with fertility with a digestive biscuit but without giving birth. OMG the digestive biscuit is a natural selection! Well almost. And that kind of reasoning is why I am single.
My point is (yes, you may have suspected that a point was lurking somewhere in the shadows of that diatribe) that the use of the digestive biscuit is an ‘ad absurdum’: taking an idea to the outer reaches of reality and seeing if the principle still applies. If the theory doesn’t work ad absurdum, then maybe the whole principle has problems.
As far as I am aware, there is no compelling evidence to suggest that digestive biscuits are a sexual selection. I wish there was, sure. But sadly it is unlikely. In the same way, just because some people like some other aspect of life, such as a small waist, that does not necessarily make it a sexual selection. Each contender for the title of “sexual selection” needs to be examined on its own merits, and the evidence at least has to be at the level of reasonable doubt to be acceptable. Parts of the body that males find sexually attractive is a good start, sure, but that is all it is: a good start. For a start (well, another start after the good start), do all men everywhere like the same things? Because if men in different geographical regions like different things, then we could argue that these are social and fashion preferences rather than sexual selections. This does not exclude them from being sexual selections necessarily, but may only account for a trait which is specific to that region. A bit like kangaroos and Australia.
So, traditionally, and in some countries, currently, females have viewed their virginity as a precious commodity in attracting a male, and have made mate choices based on their possession of a virginity. Males have preferred women to have a virginity, so the ones with the moral fortitude to not have coitus before marriage are the ones who are selected. They have a level of willpower which allegedly separates the good girls from the sluts. It may be possible to identify something in the virgin bride’s mental makeup which has given her the strength to resist coital advances. This makes it an example of a psychological evolution rather than biological evolution – a conceptual attitude which gets more offspring. This mental fortitude may or may not be a natural selection, where the woman has found the best way to survive in the environment she finds herself in (think Jane Austen). However, this does not stop it being an irrational trait selection in the male. Irrational, you hear? Irrational. Counter-reproductive. The male penchant for virgins does nothing to enhance his reproductive success. He could have as many children with a female who was a virgin as he could in the same timeframe with a wild and promiscuous creature.
The fertility of a virgin is a bit ‘Schrodinger’s cat’. There is no way of knowing whether the female is capable of reproduction, and the only way of knowing whether she is fertile is to get pregnant. By preferentially choosing a virgin as a mate means that males are making mate choices which could impact negatively on their own reproductive potential. They may be spending time copulating with a sterile female. It’s like a mystery prize in a competition.
Preferences such as virginity are not mainstream discussion topics in evolutionary psychology, although there is a lively discussion about how male choices should all be considered to be rational, or at the very least be rationalised in terms of natural selection rather than sexual selection. You know the kind of thing: young women are at the prime of childbearing capacity, they look healthier, etc. This is a load of tosh. Males select females on highly irrational, counter-productive traits – both physical and conceptual – which could not wave to rationality on a clear day from a hilltop. We all know the reason that males want virgins is that they have an urge to be utterly and completely certain that the children she has are ALL his. It is a greed thing. It is a power and control thing. If you doubt this, I challenge you to find a research paper on the size of the vagina as an evolutionary selection.
Vaginal size is an issue, because that’s where the offspring come out. And lo and behold, males are hell bent on preferring females with tight ones rather than big ones. Human baby heads are big, and a tight vagina is practically the worst trait I could possibly think of at the point of giving birth. Is it possible to die in childbirth from having a vagina which is too tight? I don’t know. I suspect that a tight birth canal is more of an issue than a wide one. Remember we talked about runaway sexual selection being potentially fatal? I suggest there may be room for putting vagina size and fitness in the evolutionary psychology epistemology (she said in a calm voice).
What I do know is that – at the point of childbirth – the bigger the better from the mother’s point of view. Yeah, go find me a woman who has had a child to disagree with THAT statement. Good luck and bon voyage.
And talking of voyages, if we look at alternatives to western patriarchy, we find that the overarching preference for small vaginas is not universal. On the contrary, vaginal size is a subject which is covered in the Kama Sutra. And frankly, the Kama Sutra does a better job of dealing with it than most evolutionary psychologists. What the Kama Sutra says is that there are three sizes of vagina – small, medium, and large – and a good match for a couple is when the size of the vagina matches the size of her partner’s penis. The Kama Sutra also suggests these come in sizes small, medium, and large. Makes sense to me. So, the preference in Western males for females with small vaginas and their own preference for a large penis runs contrary to the Kama Sutra. More than that, a small vagina may make childbirth more painful or more difficult than a large vagina.
So, like the other examples around the female body we have touched on, males are basically making evolutionary psychological decisions which reduce the chances of choosing fertile females who find giving birth an absolute dawdle, and giving the woman’s daughters a better chance of having easy births. That would be a natural selection, because childbirth is not a walk in the park. It may not be your tight vagina that kills you, but it can still be deadly. Anything (watch my lips (careful)) anything that makes childbirth easier is going to be called a natural selection. I insist. It just is. If you would like to argue this with me, please do so in person. Preferably within punching range so that I don’t have to run after you with a weapon. In fact, I am going to argue that facilitating easy childbirth is not just A natural selection, it is THE natural selection, stupid. Put it this way: take out childbirth, and how far do you get with evolutionary theory? The phrase “are you still here?” springs to mind.
Oi, Big Head
But what about brain size I hear some people ask inside my head. Sure, brain size has got a bit to do with childbirth, and we will address that in subsequent chapters. But saying that brain size is the whole problem with childbirth is like saying that tusks are the whole elephant – it is a popular view, but not the whole one. How could we prove this? I know, we will go into labour wards and ask women in labour whether they would like to have a bigger vagina for the baby to come out of. I will give you 500 to one odds that more women in labour say yes than say no. Never mind this ten centimetre dilation lark, let’s make it fifteen, or even twenty! Hoorah!
But my point is that although the size of the baby’s head is a popular subject in almost every sphere of evolutionary psychology, whereas the size of the birth canal the baby comes out of is not. They are both suitable subjects for evolutionary fitness and natural selection, because if the head became just too big to get out, that is the human species wiped out. Pouff! No more humans within a generation. So slightly relevant then? Yes I believe so. Why isn’t it discussed? Because the human male sexual selection is for smaller vaginas to have coitus with.
The Direction of Selection: Like the Rumble in the Jungle but with no Gloves. A short concluding Statement on the Purpose of writing on Evolving for Girls and the Bliss Model.
So far we have discussed female traits selected by females, even though this runs contrary to the bluffer’s guide where the females do the selecting and the males do the having of the traits. As we discussed briefly, sexual selection traits in humans are the result of patriarchy. That is, the male has been in control of female sexuality for long enough that sexual selections have appeared in the female rather than solely in the male.
I have some ideas about how we ended up being controlled like this, but I can’t back them up, and I will not be suggesting that you believe me unconditionally. What I am suggesting is that the very existence of sexual selection traits in the human female means that something is very askewey about the mate selection systems we humans have going on now. This is an evolutionary own-goal, because, as we have seen, when the males are in control of the sexual selection, they select females that:
a) might not be able to give birth
b) show as few signs as possible that they are fertile
Indeed, males positively de-select and ridicule females who can provide the physical evidence of being fertile: the droopy breasts, the saggy tummy skin, the large vagina.
However, when males do talk about their own evolutionary psychological sexually selected traits, (and they do) they tend to talk about them in positive terms: how intelligent they are, how funny they are, and how good they are at language. The section on Darwin’s Descent and his theories on human sexual selection will give you a jolly good idea of what males thought of themselves at a time (1871) when they pretty much had total control of mate choice.
We might find it in our hearts to allow that nice Mr Darwin a bit of leg-room on the social norms of the time. However, there are other evolutionary psychologists who have not fallen far from the Darwinian tree, and they don’t have the excuse of social context that Darwin did. Might I suggest a sternly-worded email as a preference to full out physical violence against them? Better still, feel free to use any or all of my suggestions in this essay as verbal ammunition to any male you feel has it coming to him.
Back to the point. The point is that patriarchy has seriously screwed with human sexual selection, particularly for women. Monogamy reduces the genetic variation in a woman’s offspring, for example. If we were looking to get the best out of the next generation, we would have a different father for each of our children. Can you imagine the face of the social worker you told that rationalisation to? “My children all have different fathers because I wanted to maximise their genetic diversity”. Yet it is an evolutionary fitness at species level – the more the variety, the more likely the species will survive, even in a changing environment, because one of them will have the mutant genes that are ideally suited to any change. A bit like the X-Men: they all have different superpowers. But if you try that tactic, you are likely to be labelled as a bad mother, a slut, used goods, or mentally instable in some extreme cases. That is, society’s norms work against female naturally selected fitnesses, such as a large vagina, small breasts, and children by different, unidentified fathers.
What if, before patriarchy, we could give birth pretty easily because we had nice big vaginas? What if we could have that for our daughters and our daughters’ daughters? So maybe they will never have to run away from lions, but maybe if they had smaller boobs, they could outrun….well, any predator, like a rapist…..without having to hold on to them, or giving themselves a black eye in the process.
For me, it is a serious feminist issue regardless of future generations: I want to be proud of my fertility and I want signs of fertility in all women to be celebrated rather than hidden away. I want issues of female physiognomy, cognition, and selected traits to be researched with the rigour and gravity of male physiognomy. And not only because it is a feminist travesty that female traits are ignored, but because evolutionary psychology is a gender-biased joke in the meantime, where males use its findings to claim that “boys will be boys” and they have evolved to be led by their penis, so that’s all right then. Rubbish. They have a head three times bigger than proto-humans. They are evolved to be led by the head on top of their shoulders, and they are evolved to be sexually selected by females. Therefore, any decent scientific enquiry should include a serious investigation of the ontology of the selecting gender to ascertain what type of male is sexually preferred by females.
Instead, the debates which are acceptable and popular in evolutionary psychology tend to be the ones that reinforce the theories laid down by Darwin in 1871. The ones which contradict the canon and strike out for freedom of female sexuality tend to be ignored or laughed at. I tell you this from experience. A discussion on what Darwin said is the subject of the next chapter, and if you don’t think it is biased in favour of males, you can email me and tell me why. I would love to hear that explanation.
I use the word ‘androcentric’ a lot. It means centred around males. I use it instead of misogynistic because it has less of a value bias, it is a less common word and therefore an excuse to get into an evolutionary psychological debate at the least encouragement (and it is easier to type). I believe that Darwin is androcentric, and that the research edifice which has grown up around the Origin of Species, and more recently the Descent of Man, is androcentric. The worst part is that Darwin’s core hypothesis is brilliant, with the simplicity and beauty of good theory: part of being male is displaying sexually selected traits, and part of being female is selecting them.
It is my humble opinion that there are not a lot of women researchers in evolutionary psychology because a lot of it is just so hard to take without the desire to punch some researchers in the nuts and asking them what you ever did to them to deserve such bullshit being said about you.
This is both perfectly understandable and a crying shame. I suggest we start with the core theory as defined above, and see where this would lead from a feminist perspective. The aim of this essay is ultimately to initiate the discussion about a female-centred companion to the current androcentric model of evolution where both viewpoints are taken in tandem. It’s a tall order, but it’s a start.
Right, if you are still up for it after that, get your grinding teeth at the ready, we start the chronicle of evolutionary psychological theory-building with its daddy - Charles Darwin – and his lesser known book, The Descent of Man.