Chapter the Second: Darwin's view of Human Sexual Selection
Darwin’s view of human sexual selection
“….this must have occurred long ago, before our ancestors had become sufficiently human to treat and value their women as merely useful slaves”
Introduction
The above quote is from the Descent of Man, published by Charles Darwin in 1871, twelve years after the Origin of Species. Sexual selection had been mentioned in the Origin of Species as one way evolution could move forward. Darwin defines sexual selection in Origin as a “struggle between males for possession of the females. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring.” (p.136).
In Descent, the description of sexual selection is:
“…when the males and females of any animal have the same general habits of life, but differ in structure, colour, or ornament, such differences have been mainly caused by sexual selection; that is, individual males have had, in successive generations, some slight advantage over other males, in their weapons, means of defence, or charms, and have transmitted these advantages to their male offspring.”
What Darwin is proposing is that males use all sorts of tricks to get females. Although some males equate the struggle as being a violence-based rumble every mating season, but there are a whole shed load of peaceful methods, such as vocal displays, physical displays, and behavioural traits. As examples, think of the peacock’s feathers, finches’ songs or the bower bird’s nest-building. These would all count as sexual selections, as they have no evident adaptive value which would allow them to survive better in their environment, but help them to get laid. If they don’t get laid, they don’t leave any offspring.
That is fair enough as far as it goes. Sexual selection can be viewed as ‘round two’ of evolutionary progress where the organism has managed to survive, and now has to pass on its genetic information. However, you might have noticed in the quote that sexual selection is a process primarily associated with males. We – as females – are doing the ‘being possessed’ bit.
Now, it may be a subtle difference, but males fighting as to who can possess me is not the same thing as me having a free choice over the male I prefer. Being possessed sounds like a passive state, where I stand around and watch what happens. This is not sounding much like any selection process I have a part of. I mean, imagine being the trophy presented at a rugby match, and deciding which side should win.
Darwin is of his time, we can all agree on that. However, much as it can be difficult to get past all the androcentricity, at the core, sexual selection could be a very powerful feminist tool. It says that – in a large majority of species – males struggle to be selected by females for coitus, and this struggle results in seemingly weird and wonderful traits that have nothing to do with surviving in the environment. Fabulous. As a bare-bones theory, I love it. It is one of my all time favourite theories. I am sitting on the power to influence evolutionary direction. Literally.
The main problem I have with Darwin is that his androcentric context leads him to some very infuriating conclusions about humans. In particular, I am not very happy about his ideas that human females are sexually selected by human males. That is like the trophy struggling with other trophies to attract the attention of the rugby teams as to which trophy they would like to compete for. Pardon? The theoretical beauty of the model has now exited the building. The males are still competing, but now they are doing the selecting as well. Did you spot the plot theme there? Males are competing as well as selecting. Having their cake and eating it. Oh it is so not the last time I will be saying that phrase.
So Darwin is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, in 1871, I, and the rest of my gender, am a trophy, and it is important to understand just how deep and strong this attitude is for the originator of evolutionary theory. On the other hand, as a potentially pro-active player in the sexual selection game, Darwin gives me the ultimate tool: I should be the gender making the sexual selections.
Sexual selection in 1871: quotes from the Descent of Man
Ok, so the bit of Descent that I am particularly interested in for current purposes is Part 3: Sexual Selection in Relation to Man (and conclusion). The section starts at chapter 19: Secondary Sexual Characteristics of Man. The quotations are in the order they appear in the book, so that we get a flavour of the way Darwin wanted the argument to be framed.
A few paragraphs in, humans are compared to other mammals in terms of the differences perceived between the male and female versions:
“With mankind, the differences between the sexes are greater…Man on average is considerably taller, heavier, and stronger than woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly-pronounced muscles…His body and especially his face is more hairy, and his voice has a different and more powerful tone….Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether or not proportionately to his larger body, has not, I believe, been fully ascertained” (pp.846-847).
Since this appears early in the chapter, we might believe that this is a primary assumption which colours the rest of the argument: these are Darwin’s assumptions. All theories and models have assumptions and that is ok. Sometimes writers hide their assumptions, or pretend that they don’t have any. Then the reader has to go looking for them or try to work out what they are. This is both annoying and fun. It is a task to find hidden assumptions, but the reader can then decide for themselves what the assumptions are, and critique the piece on grounds that the author may not have considered in the first place. Other writing has the assumptions front and centre, sometimes explicitly defining the assumptions the writer has made. Personally, I see this as a sign that the writer is more thoughtful, less full of their own genius, and somehow an all round more reasonable person.
Darwin does not label the above paragraph “The Assumptions”, but it is front and centre. For me, this shows that the guy has thought about what he is writing and he doesn’t think he is flaw-free. Instead, I read this paragraph as the viewpoint for the rest of the section: men are just all round better, and that is how we are going to play it. Rather than getting angry about it (well, after getting angry about it) I decided that it is possible to read this section in a way which is positive. We can assume that Darwin is talking from an androcentric viewpoint. That is, he is a man, he lives in a patriarchal culture and he is bigging up the male point of view. It could be viewed as a dialogue, where the female counterpart to this androcentric viewpoint is missing – as if he is talking into a phone, and we can only hear one side of a debate.
Following this statement, Darwin discusses hairiness and skin tones between genders and between races, making this conclusion:
“All the secondary sexual characters of man are highly variable, even within the limits of the same race, and they differ much in the several races…nearly all…measurements show that the males differ much more from one another than do the females. This fact indicates that, as far as these characteristics are concerned, it is the male which has been chiefly modified, since the several races diverged from their common stock.” (p.852)
The above quote is extremely important. What it is saying is that human males are built to be the competitors in a sexual selection. Remember the tick-list? The wide bandwidth of a trait signals a sexually selected trait. In other words, the males provide the variety from which females choose. Well that’s it then. Isn’t it? Males have the traits and females choose. He said it right there. Female human sexual selection. Indeed, he goes on to describe competition between the males to be sexually selected in the “Laws of Battle “:
“With savages, for instance, the Australians, the women are the constant cause of war both between members of the same tribe and between distinct tribes” (p.854)
What is being said is that human males compete. No news there, of course, and you will hear the same thing said on an overwhelming number of natural history programmes. However, the very notion that males compete infers that they are the selectees, not the selectors. They are bashing each other up so that they knobble the other guy’s chances of looking good in front of the girl. In some species, males end up taking this knobbling so seriously that they kill each other. In other cases, just looking like a complete idiot is enough.
However, Darwin makes a connection between males fighting and females being the cause of it. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that females are actively involved in “being a cause”. Yes, we all know some women who like to have men fighting over them, but in the majority of sane individuals, we don’t want to watch males beat themselves to a pulp just to impress us. There is no evidence to suggest that the whole evolution of violence has been developed because females have insisted that they will only accept battle-hardened generals for coitus. A lot of the ritualised fighting done by men is done in front of an almost totally male audience, like football. Women don’t go in their droves to watch males compete, they don’t go as spectators into war zones, they don’t make up the majority of the audience at boxing matches. On the whole, males fight amongst themselves whilst other males watch.
So males may fight to knobble each other’s chances, sure, but this cannot be directly causally related to a female wish for males to fight for possession of them, or even for the opportunity to have sex with them. This is mainly because the majority of women are not paying attention to males competing in the first place. Indeed, since Darwin, there has been some neat research that shows that in some species, the females choose the loser in a fight (e.g. Ophir & Bennett, 2003), and we will be discussing this in later chapters.
My personal opinion is that some males would fight themselves in an empty room, and attracting females is just an excuse. Darwin uses the example of Helen of Troy, and this is pretty appropriate. We all know that sacking Troy wasn’t just about getting the woman back, it was about power and wealth and greed and a natural tendency to knobble each other at every available opportunity. Males compete because males have a lot more testosterone than females, and they have more testosterone because they are competing to thin out the competition from other males when they try to get a mate. It is the qualifying rounds, if you will.
It is the result of fighting, rather than the act of it which influences the female sexual selection. However, this may not be because females like winners, but because the loser is no longer able to join in the chase. Chasing after women is more difficult with broken legs, but it does not follow that women prefer males who break legs. He is just the only one chasing her. Now for males, this might seem like a single purpose: knobble the other guy to get the girl. This is the assumption of natural history programmes. For females, it is not singular. Males fight between themselves, and it has precious little to do with the female selection process, except to provide them with a whittled-down short-list. More on this later. Meanwhile, back in Descent, Darwin elaborates on this point, citing Hearne:
“” It has ever been the custom among these people for the men to wrestle for any woman to whom they are attached; and, of course, the strongest party always carries off the prize. A weak man, unless he be a good hunter, and well-beloved, is seldom permitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice. This custom prevails throughout all the tribes, and causes a great spirit of emulation among their youth, who are upon all occasions, from their childhood, trying their strength and skill in wrestling””(p.855).
Although this looks as if it is justification for cross-cultural universality in fighting for sexual selection, it isn’t. The difference is that the male is pro-active gender rather than the female. The male takes a notion that he wants a particular woman, and so he knobbles the competition, even if it is someone else’s partner. Note also that this is called a ‘custom’ rather than a genetic imperative. Customs do evolve, sure. Dawkins calls them memes. However, this does not mean that males fighting is a sexual selective trait. If it was, then males would all have to fight before coitus, and plainly that is not the case. Like I said, we are not all at the boxing ring looking for our next sexual adventure, and we are most of us capable of being sexually attracted to a man who really doesn’t want to fight anybody or anything ever. Indeed, it could be argued that this fighting knobbles the pacifist competitors in favour of the aggressive ones.
Also note that if the female were sexually selected by males, then it would be the females fighting for the attention of males. Yes, yes, we all know that we compete, but Darwin doesn’t. Female competition is not a prime plot line in Descent. Which is a shame, because that would have been more in keeping with his assertions further in the chapter. As it is, what is being said here is that males compete for the females that the males choose as partners. This is known in the vernacular as (you guessed it) “having your cake and eating it”: being both the gender selecting the mate, and the one competing for it. Females are denied both sides of the sexual selection role. They are neither the competitors nor the selectors: they are the trophy.
Darwin believes that fighting is a sexual selection because males have bigger muscles than females, but that this is not down to women being lazy (at least in ‘savage’ tribes like the Australians [sorry, that is just too funny not to include]). However he does go on to suggest that:
“With civilised people the arbitrament of battle for the possession of the women has long ceased; on the other hand, the men, as a general rule, have to work harder than the women for their joint subsistence, and thus their greater strength has been kept up” (p.857).
In other words, going out to earn a living is basically a lot harder work physically than being a housekeeper and mother. Hands up the mothers thinking “dream on”. We can be pretty sure that Darwin: a) didn’t bother asking mothers, and b) never tried it out himself. Moving on.
The next section in the chapter of Descent is entitled: “Difference in the Mental Powers of the two Sexes”. After listing a number of animals where there are differences in the “disposition” of the genders, Darwin states that:
“Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness…Woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she would often extend them towards her fellow creatures. Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily to selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright (pp.857-858)
Are these the same women as the ones who are choosing the winners in the competitions? If women are more tender and less selfish, and this passes from their childrearing to all areas of life, then aggression and violence in males don’t seem like good qualities in a mate. Who would like to be the one volunteering to tell females who suffer from domestic violence that they have made the best sexual selection, and that they are genetically predisposed to select the most violent, aggressive males they can find? Or is it being suggested that males only ever fight other males? Maybe there are two kinds of violence: one for sexual selection, and the other for beating up the women-folk. That must be it. It couldn’t possibly be because he is more selfish and will simply beat up anyone in his way, even though Darwin just said he was, because that would mean that beating people up is just a plain old trait, not a sexual selection by the female.
However, just when you might think Darwin was actually complimenting females on their softer side, he goes and says this:
“It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation” (p.858).
So, civilised = selfish, brutal competitiveness; and savage, lower state of civilisation = intuitive, rapid perception. Ok, so the word ‘bankster’ is going through my head right now. I wonder why. Could it be that the floor of stock exchanges could be more in tune with the description of ‘civilisation’ than the ‘savage’ one?
So, what we have here is a situation where males are both the competitors and the selectors of females, and that their greater selfish competitiveness is an indicator of highly evolved civilisation. Welcome to patriarchy, where the traits necessary to nurture and grow the children males fight so hard to get are described as a lower state of civilisation. At this point of reading, my emotions go from “idiot!” to “bastard!”
It starts to get personal, being called a lower state of civilisation.
Let me make this clear: in terms of evolutionary success, it is really not helpful to be beaten up on by males when you are trying to bring up children. A mother who has a black eye might not be able to watch out for the welfare of those children as well as a mother who is loved and cosseted by her male mate. Therefore, domestic violence is not only repugnant in itself, it is counter-evolutionary. Perpetrators of domestic violence reduce their chances of evolutionary success because they are handicapping their offspring through handicapping their mother, asshole. Even if we go along with the notion that mothering is all that a woman is good for (and I am not saying that it is) and that women are by nature less selfish and more intuitive (and I am not saying that they are), and males all have a desperate, primal urge to produce offspring (and I am not saying they all do), then the argument still stands. Handicapping mothers is self-defeating in the reproduction stakes. Civilisation and higher states of being in evolutionary terms (as well as others) is surely the opposite of selfish competition: it is care centred round the mother in order to gain most benefits for their offspring. Good grief, the positive impact of the assistance of the extended kinship group is a sub-set of evolutionary psychology. If males are, as Darwin suggests, less capable of providing altruistic care, then perhaps they are not intended to be part of a child/mother-centred household. Perhaps they are a transient element like FedEx: delivering the necessary goods then leaving.
Can’t be nice?
Can’t be here.
If that is not hurtful enough, immediately following the above quote, Darwin goes on to say that:
“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can women – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work, Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in a man must be above that of woman. Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy”. (p.858)
Sorry – this is a long quote, but I really can’t stop here – it goes on:
“With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles. They have, also, in the case of mankind, to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, or to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely: observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life. Consequently in accordance with the principle often alluded to, we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood. Now, when two men are put into competition, or a man with a woman, both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, perseverance, and courage, the latter will generally become more eminent in every pursuit, and will gain the ascendancy. He may be said to possess genius- for genius has been declared by a great authority to be patience and patience, in this sense, means unflinching, undaunted perseverance. But this view of genius is perhaps deficient; for without the higher powers of the imagination and reason, no eminent success can be gained in many subjects. These latter faculties, as well as the former, will have been developed in man, partly through sexual selection – that is through the contest of rival males……” (pp.858-859)
(Sorry for interrupting, but I just wanted to stop there and repeat that the contest between rival males is not a pro-active sexual selection by the female, but the act of “being a trophy”)
“…and partly through natural selection….many of our mental faculties by sexual selection….notoriously undergo a considerable change at puberty, and…eunuchs remain throughout life inferior in these same qualities. Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to women as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen” (pp.859-860)
Darwin goes on to talk about how females might just manage to get up to a standard of intellectual capacity close to the average male if she was intensively trained, but this would leave no time for giving birth to lots of children. Sadly, then, we will likely be perennially inferior to males in intellectual capacity.
Angry yet? Let me help you along a little by taking you out of the nineteenth century for a moment, and into the twenty-first century, just so that we can see how much stuff has changed.
In the year 2000, Larry Summers, who was then Dean at Harvard, said pretty much the same thing about females in the science department: that they were not suited to the rigours of the hard sciences. Yes, really – Google it. The reason I am giving Darwin’s diatribe-masking-as-theory so much attention is that this view has not gone away. One hundred and fifty years later and females still only make up a minority of engineering and business studies, and in the boardroom, for example (Davis, 2011 etc). Parkin (1996) notes that early neurocognitive researchers thought that the right hemisphere of the brain (assumed to be the intuitive, touchy feely side as opposed to the rational, logical left hemisphere) was not considered to be worth studying because it was just so much dead weight in terms of intelligence. That wasn’t Parkin’s view, but posited as an explanation of how a pervasive gender inequality can influence modern research assumptions.
Yes, of course, some stuff has changed. But this is the attitude evolutionary psychology was built on. When Miller (2001) wrote The Mating Mind, he argued that the brain evolved as a sexual selection by the female, and that intelligence and language in males were sexually attractive to females. In fact, Miller says that women developed brains to appreciate male intelligence. I kid you not.
Miller is a step forward, because he at least tries to put some sort of case for sexual selection by the female, but he still perpetuates the same opinion that males are intellectually superior to females. Yes, it is true that males have a wider bandwidth of intelligence tests: there are more males at the lower and higher end of cognitive performance tests. However, the validity of intelligence tests is something that we will discuss with the rest of cognition in Chapter ().
Do you notice that the same ‘have your cake and eat it’ trick is pulled when deciding what traits should be sexually selected by females? That is, where males have a trait, it is a good sexual selection trait, but where females have the trait it is not. Females are not asked which traits they prefer, or Goddess forbid, let them get on with choosing the sexually attractive traits for themselves. They might choose ones that males didn’t like having, such as altruism and cooperation. Aggressive, intelligent, selfish, competitive males aren’t likely to be asking, because they are selfish and competitive. They are competing with women to have the sexual selection traits that count. They are insisting that they are the king of the castle, so what they have is tautologously superior. Just because they have it.
This type of dominance is likely to increase to the point where males become increasingly picky about females. This increase in pickiness from males would lead to sexually selected traits in females, and this is the case under patriarchy. This does not pass Darwin by. In discussing the influence of beauty on mate choice, Darwin notes that:
“In civilised life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance.” (p.873)
He goes on to describe a wide variety of preferences and physical adornments and mutilations commonplace in a large number of different areas of the world, including both less developed countries and highly developed ones, such as Japan. There are descriptions of both male and female preferences, which is developed over fifteen pages, and his conclusion is that there is a wide variety of definitions of beauty between cultures. He notes that tastes differ widely, often based on what the locals are used to experiencing, such as the shape of features, and he suggests that where a trait is considered to be beautiful, individuals will go to extreme lengths – up to and including mutilation – to exaggerate these qualities. Indeed, it could be argued that had Darwin anticipated surgical breast augmentation or trout lips, he may have included plastic surgery as an example of these practices. He concludes that beauty is not easily defined, and that males tend towards novelty. He quotes Bichat, saying that:
“…if everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characteristics a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.”
Although Darwin reports on both male and female preferences when discussing other cultures, he reverts to the preferences of males in ‘civilised’ countries. He does describe physical attributes in terms of sexual selection, but as a male sexual selection in females, not the reverse. Males are “charmed” by female physical qualities. I am not sure whether this is before or after they have fought for possession of them. Maybe they only fight for the females they are charmed by, and that these charms are not just beautiful in themselves, but are unusual and novel. This is an important point. Evolutionary psychologists argue that symmetry of features is beautiful. What Darwin is saying that it is novelty: that which is unusual, whatever it is. I am with Darwin on this one, and this will be discussed at greater length in Chapter (). However, in the meantime, what Darwin is saying is that human females are judged on their external appearance in the same way male peacocks are. If this is the case, then he is suggesting that human males sexually select human females. As well as competing for them. Another having your cake and eating it moment? Oh, I think so.
I believe Darwin is expressing something quite common still: females are judged more by their appearance than males are. Have you ever heard the saying that males are more “visual” than females? Ok, so you might be saying something along the lines of “No shit, Sherlock” at this point. However, there are implications which arise from this:
a) Patriarchy over several thousand years may have resulted in the development of sexually selected attributes in females with regard to physical appearance. This is particularly true of fleshy parts such as breasts, but could also be influential in terms of attributes such as height, waist and hip sizes, hairiness, or foot size.
b) It could also have had a negative impact on female personality or intellectual capacity, where docile or compliant females were preferentially sexually selected.
c) The continuous and ubiquitous reinforcement of ideals of physical appearance on females can serve as a meme which, over the centuries, develops to the point where this type of sexual selection by the male seems natural, rather than a by-product of patriarchy.
So what evidence do I have for saying that sexual selection in humans as described by Darwin is grounded in patriarchy? Well, Darwin says so himself:
“With mankind, especially with savages, many causes interfere with the action of sexual selection as far as the bodily frame is concerned. Civilised men are largely attracted by the mental charms of women, by their wealth, and especially by their social position; for men rarely marry into a much lower rank.” (p.893).
Now for the moment we will overlook Darwin’s change of mind as to the primary traits of attractiveness in women from their physical appearance to their mental charms. What we are concentrating on is the notion that the social system influences mate selection. Darwin even suggests that females make the same kinds of socially-based choices:
“With respect to the opposite form of selection, namely, of the more attractive men by the women, although in civilised nations women have free or almost free choice, which is not the case with barbarous races, yet their choice is largely influenced by the social position and wealth of the men; and the success of the latter in life depends much on their intellectual powers and energy, or on the fruits of these same powers in their forefathers.” (p.893)
Again, there are issues to be raised as to the supposed free choice of women in Darwinian times (we are talking 1860s here). However, if we put that to one side for the moment, he is claiming that sexual selection by the female is also bound up in cultural practices and preferences. Indeed, we can see that old cliché appearing, where females select males for their money and power.
Let me make this clear: I am in no way suggesting that females in the 1860s were any more ignorant or shallow than I am. In a society where women could do very little to steer their own course through life, a good marriage could make a huge difference. Read or watch any Jane Austen to figure that one out. They made the best job they could with the options they had available to them, end of. What I am saying is that if you are in that position, the social norms of the day are masking – if not downright skewing – the natural inclinations of women when choosing a mate. Their choices have been narrowed down by society to the point where, over time, these social decisions alter the natural course of mate selection. The interesting bit that we all get heated up about is which selection processes are purely cultural and which ones would have happened anyway in the wild.
What we can be sure of is that females did not select males in the wild on the basis of their inherited wealth. How do we know this? Because fifty pound notes are not physically attached to men, and they do not begin to excrete them at puberty, along with their breaking voices and hairy faces. Wealth in terms of bank balances and estates can be inherited, but not genetically.
There is a case for claiming that inherited wealth and position do account for the male being better fed, better looked after, and generally given all the advantages their family can muster, and this is very likely to make a difference in their general appearance: good skin, good teeth, etc. So if women were sexually selecting men on their physical attributes such as skin and teeth, then we could say that wealth and power were valid indirect forms of sexual selection. However, if you take this argument to its logical conclusion – as Darwin does – you come out at a point where royal families should be the pinnacle of health and beauty:
“Many persons are convinced, as it appears to be with justice, that our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to the European standard, than the middle classes…..” (p.894)
Again, put to one side the notion that Darwin can’t make up his mind whether physical or social attributes are sexually selected. He goes on to reject the notion of general health and fitness through parental care:
“…. yet the middle classes are placed under equally favourable conditions of life for the perfect development of the body” (p.894)
In other words, Darwin is suggesting that parental care cannot be the whole story. He goes on to describe pockets of beauty and ugliness from a variety of cultures and societies. At this point we need to remember that Darwin had previously said that beauty was subjective, and was open to the forces of change through a desire for novelty or geographical location. Now he is saying that beauty can be enhanced through many generations of inheritance, disregarding the notion that the definition of beauty is likely to change over time. The only way in which Darwin could be correct here is if the aristocracy were somehow able to predict the direction of the definition of beauty fifteen years in advance. This is because the beauty of the individual in terms of sexual selection needs to appear at puberty. A child who has beautiful parents in one time or place has to gamble that the standards of beauty will not have radically changed in the intervening period. Take Prince Charles’s ears. Large ears may have been considered to be beautiful when he was born sixty years ago. They may have been seen as a sign of superior genetic development, and preferentially sexually selected by females. At the time of giving birth to his offspring, he would hope that his sons would have big ears, as this would mean that they, too, would be preferentially sexually selected by females for physical attributes rather than social status. But if the fashion for big ears changes in the time between the son being born and reaching puberty, the son will no longer be preferentially sexually selected by females.
The notion that parents are able to pick and choose the attributes their offspring have will be a subject that we will pick up again in greater detail, but for the meantime, even if they could, it might not be any help to their offspring in the evolutionary ‘beauty contest’ in the next generation.
Marriage
Darwin then turns his attention on the types of relationships in different regions at different times. He notes that sexual selection only needs to occur on a very temporary basis between the male and the female for the purposes of coitus to pregnancy. He also suggests that the wide variety of types of relationships in different regions points to the notion that the ideal of lifelong monogamy as practiced in the West is not being held up as the ‘right’ way. On the contrary, he suggests that the prevalence of ‘communal’ forms of relationships in less developed societies points to these forms being more ‘natural’ than monogamy. Indeed, he quotes Lubbock in suggesting that:
“…in old times high honour was bestowed on women who were utterly licentious; and this….is intelligible, if we admit that promiscuous intercourse was…long revered custom in the tribe….marriage, in any strict sense of the word, has been gradually developed; and that almost promiscuous or very loose intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world. (p.900)
Little gems like this are what makes Darwin worthwhile for me. When he follows his own line of logic and goes with the flow, he says some seriously outrageous things for his time. Unfortunately he goes on to say that he has difficulty with this notion, because jealousy would get in the way. Similarly, he says that:
“…the males of some species are monogamous, but live during only a part of the year with the females” (p.900)
So what we have here is Darwin approaching the problem of the ‘unnaturalness’ of lifelong monogamy which was utterly dominant in his own cultural context. The evidence he is gathering tells him that promiscuity and temporary mating partnerships is likely to have been the norm, and even when animals were monogamous, they only lived together a part of the time. The way he squares this is by suggesting that jealousy between males tends to make polygamous states “extremely improbable”. (p.901). That is, although it is quite possible to envisage a single man with a lot of wives, it is not possible for a woman to live with several husbands. The men-folk would get to beating each other up for hierarchical position very quickly. This, of course, assumes that females don’t get jealous of each other, or that their preferences mean so little that female jealousy isn’t worth talking about.
His ‘third way’ conclusion is that males who do not have harems would tend to be more nomadic than females, getting coitus where they can, and then disappearing off into the sunset. Ok. I can go with that a bit of the way: males do get jealous and they are likely to end up fighting over women. However, if we are going to go with this version, then we need to be clear that nomadic males are not identifiable fathers. If they want to be identified as a father, then they need to stick around and guard the female from any other male until they are sure that she is pregnant. Without a pregnancy test, this could take a while – pregnancy doesn’t show up for months, and no-one is saying that the woman feels obliged to tell the male, never mind reassure his ego that he is the father of the potential child.
In other words, coitus may produce babies, but that is not why we do it. And this is important: separating sex from babies means that the reasons we chose a specific sexual partner may have nothing to do with the genetic advantages bestowed on our children. Why would I say that? Oh, I don’t know…contraception, maybe? Homosexual sex? Sex after menopause? In chapter four, we are going to go into theories such as the dual strategy theory, which marks the point at which evolutionary hypothesists begin to tackle the issue of female infidelity. The way theorists attempt to reduce female sexual selection to reproductive advantage is truly comical to me, and I hope I can convey the sense in which males in the evo industry have bent over backwards not to say that women select mates just because they like the look of them for sexual purposes, not because they want babies. This is a concept which has been very difficult for them, poor dears. That does not mean, however, that I am going to go easy on them. Hell no. I owe it to Jane Austen to take the argument to them, and do my best to take it to bits. Of course, I don’t have to enjoy doing it. It just so happens that I do.
Refusal often offends
Something that is notable by its absence in Descent is the notion that females can refuse to copulate. This is important, because the refusal influences the male’s chances of getting his evolutionary powers into the next generation. A refusal is tantamount to telling the male that he is doomed to be the last of his line, and all that surviving and fighting over her were for nothing. This, dear readers, is the power of female sexual selection. Ok, so I am going to argue that male researchers asking females if they want as much coitus as males are ridiculous deviations from methodological validity and reliability. However, I retain the right to refuse coitus, even with the winner! (shock, horror). In Darwinian sexual selection theory, this just doesn’t happen. As we discussed above, the fighting and the possession of the female tend to be viewed as a single activity, and so one follows naturally on from the other. Winners get laid, QED. However, if we take an extreme example to illustrate this point, what about the soldiers who win a war, and then go on to rape the female population of the losing side? This works perfectly well under Darwinian sexual selection: battle for possession of the females. Job done.
So why don’t we think that war rape is ok? Because the illusion of female pro-action in the selection process has been removed. She isn’t selecting the male because she thinks he is the best guy around, he has decided that for her. For most peaceable people nowadays, it is important that females have the capacity to reject a sexual advance, at least in legal terms. But deep down in Darwinian sexual selection, it’s not the done thing. If we refuse a male, we are messing up that nice neat theory where the winners of struggles get the girl. In other words, the power to say no is the ultimate female evolutionary power. It is being the trophy who refuses to be passively handed to the winning team.
Is there evidence for the notion that females refuse winners? I am glad you asked. Why, yes. Yes, there is. There is even evidence from non-human species where the female selects the loser in a battle in more than one species. But there is a more compelling reason: there are ‘nice guys’ around. For our current purposes, ‘nice guys’ are the ones who want to help mum raise the kids in the best way possible. Nice guys are the kind of men who take on adoptive children just in order to be a dad, because they believe that being part of a family is really cool.
The ‘nice guy’ is not my invention. It has been used in evolutionary theory to differentiate between the males who simply impregnate a woman and leave her to it, and the men who stick around and help bring up the kids. Some theories which differentiate between the ‘nice guy’ and the ‘jerk’ are more plausible than others, and I will leave you to decide which ones you prefer as we go along. However, in the meantime, this differentiation suggests that there are at least two types of male. Where do these men come from? Well, they might be competing covertly about who can be the nicest partner by showering their partner with love and attention. Cool – I am all for that, and I believe that this is not an unusual or undesirable state. However, altruism of this sort is something that evolutionary theorists have some problems with, because it doesn’t seem to have any evolutionary purpose. Evolution is served by being selfish and competitive, right?
And besides, if the guys getting the girls are the big hairy bruiser types who have beaten the competition to a pulp, how come their offspring are not all big hairy bruisers too?
As we go on through popular evolutionary theorising, I would like you to keep it in the back of your mind that very few of these theories consider the half of the genome we acquire from our mothers, and how little it matters to evolutionists. If Darwin is right, and females are indeed more intuitive and loving, why is it so improbable that male children acquire some of their mother’s personality? Answers on a postcard.
“….this must have occurred long ago, before our ancestors had become sufficiently human to treat and value their women as merely useful slaves”
Introduction
The above quote is from the Descent of Man, published by Charles Darwin in 1871, twelve years after the Origin of Species. Sexual selection had been mentioned in the Origin of Species as one way evolution could move forward. Darwin defines sexual selection in Origin as a “struggle between males for possession of the females. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring.” (p.136).
In Descent, the description of sexual selection is:
“…when the males and females of any animal have the same general habits of life, but differ in structure, colour, or ornament, such differences have been mainly caused by sexual selection; that is, individual males have had, in successive generations, some slight advantage over other males, in their weapons, means of defence, or charms, and have transmitted these advantages to their male offspring.”
What Darwin is proposing is that males use all sorts of tricks to get females. Although some males equate the struggle as being a violence-based rumble every mating season, but there are a whole shed load of peaceful methods, such as vocal displays, physical displays, and behavioural traits. As examples, think of the peacock’s feathers, finches’ songs or the bower bird’s nest-building. These would all count as sexual selections, as they have no evident adaptive value which would allow them to survive better in their environment, but help them to get laid. If they don’t get laid, they don’t leave any offspring.
That is fair enough as far as it goes. Sexual selection can be viewed as ‘round two’ of evolutionary progress where the organism has managed to survive, and now has to pass on its genetic information. However, you might have noticed in the quote that sexual selection is a process primarily associated with males. We – as females – are doing the ‘being possessed’ bit.
Now, it may be a subtle difference, but males fighting as to who can possess me is not the same thing as me having a free choice over the male I prefer. Being possessed sounds like a passive state, where I stand around and watch what happens. This is not sounding much like any selection process I have a part of. I mean, imagine being the trophy presented at a rugby match, and deciding which side should win.
Darwin is of his time, we can all agree on that. However, much as it can be difficult to get past all the androcentricity, at the core, sexual selection could be a very powerful feminist tool. It says that – in a large majority of species – males struggle to be selected by females for coitus, and this struggle results in seemingly weird and wonderful traits that have nothing to do with surviving in the environment. Fabulous. As a bare-bones theory, I love it. It is one of my all time favourite theories. I am sitting on the power to influence evolutionary direction. Literally.
The main problem I have with Darwin is that his androcentric context leads him to some very infuriating conclusions about humans. In particular, I am not very happy about his ideas that human females are sexually selected by human males. That is like the trophy struggling with other trophies to attract the attention of the rugby teams as to which trophy they would like to compete for. Pardon? The theoretical beauty of the model has now exited the building. The males are still competing, but now they are doing the selecting as well. Did you spot the plot theme there? Males are competing as well as selecting. Having their cake and eating it. Oh it is so not the last time I will be saying that phrase.
So Darwin is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, in 1871, I, and the rest of my gender, am a trophy, and it is important to understand just how deep and strong this attitude is for the originator of evolutionary theory. On the other hand, as a potentially pro-active player in the sexual selection game, Darwin gives me the ultimate tool: I should be the gender making the sexual selections.
Sexual selection in 1871: quotes from the Descent of Man
Ok, so the bit of Descent that I am particularly interested in for current purposes is Part 3: Sexual Selection in Relation to Man (and conclusion). The section starts at chapter 19: Secondary Sexual Characteristics of Man. The quotations are in the order they appear in the book, so that we get a flavour of the way Darwin wanted the argument to be framed.
A few paragraphs in, humans are compared to other mammals in terms of the differences perceived between the male and female versions:
“With mankind, the differences between the sexes are greater…Man on average is considerably taller, heavier, and stronger than woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly-pronounced muscles…His body and especially his face is more hairy, and his voice has a different and more powerful tone….Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether or not proportionately to his larger body, has not, I believe, been fully ascertained” (pp.846-847).
Since this appears early in the chapter, we might believe that this is a primary assumption which colours the rest of the argument: these are Darwin’s assumptions. All theories and models have assumptions and that is ok. Sometimes writers hide their assumptions, or pretend that they don’t have any. Then the reader has to go looking for them or try to work out what they are. This is both annoying and fun. It is a task to find hidden assumptions, but the reader can then decide for themselves what the assumptions are, and critique the piece on grounds that the author may not have considered in the first place. Other writing has the assumptions front and centre, sometimes explicitly defining the assumptions the writer has made. Personally, I see this as a sign that the writer is more thoughtful, less full of their own genius, and somehow an all round more reasonable person.
Darwin does not label the above paragraph “The Assumptions”, but it is front and centre. For me, this shows that the guy has thought about what he is writing and he doesn’t think he is flaw-free. Instead, I read this paragraph as the viewpoint for the rest of the section: men are just all round better, and that is how we are going to play it. Rather than getting angry about it (well, after getting angry about it) I decided that it is possible to read this section in a way which is positive. We can assume that Darwin is talking from an androcentric viewpoint. That is, he is a man, he lives in a patriarchal culture and he is bigging up the male point of view. It could be viewed as a dialogue, where the female counterpart to this androcentric viewpoint is missing – as if he is talking into a phone, and we can only hear one side of a debate.
Following this statement, Darwin discusses hairiness and skin tones between genders and between races, making this conclusion:
“All the secondary sexual characters of man are highly variable, even within the limits of the same race, and they differ much in the several races…nearly all…measurements show that the males differ much more from one another than do the females. This fact indicates that, as far as these characteristics are concerned, it is the male which has been chiefly modified, since the several races diverged from their common stock.” (p.852)
The above quote is extremely important. What it is saying is that human males are built to be the competitors in a sexual selection. Remember the tick-list? The wide bandwidth of a trait signals a sexually selected trait. In other words, the males provide the variety from which females choose. Well that’s it then. Isn’t it? Males have the traits and females choose. He said it right there. Female human sexual selection. Indeed, he goes on to describe competition between the males to be sexually selected in the “Laws of Battle “:
“With savages, for instance, the Australians, the women are the constant cause of war both between members of the same tribe and between distinct tribes” (p.854)
What is being said is that human males compete. No news there, of course, and you will hear the same thing said on an overwhelming number of natural history programmes. However, the very notion that males compete infers that they are the selectees, not the selectors. They are bashing each other up so that they knobble the other guy’s chances of looking good in front of the girl. In some species, males end up taking this knobbling so seriously that they kill each other. In other cases, just looking like a complete idiot is enough.
However, Darwin makes a connection between males fighting and females being the cause of it. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that females are actively involved in “being a cause”. Yes, we all know some women who like to have men fighting over them, but in the majority of sane individuals, we don’t want to watch males beat themselves to a pulp just to impress us. There is no evidence to suggest that the whole evolution of violence has been developed because females have insisted that they will only accept battle-hardened generals for coitus. A lot of the ritualised fighting done by men is done in front of an almost totally male audience, like football. Women don’t go in their droves to watch males compete, they don’t go as spectators into war zones, they don’t make up the majority of the audience at boxing matches. On the whole, males fight amongst themselves whilst other males watch.
So males may fight to knobble each other’s chances, sure, but this cannot be directly causally related to a female wish for males to fight for possession of them, or even for the opportunity to have sex with them. This is mainly because the majority of women are not paying attention to males competing in the first place. Indeed, since Darwin, there has been some neat research that shows that in some species, the females choose the loser in a fight (e.g. Ophir & Bennett, 2003), and we will be discussing this in later chapters.
My personal opinion is that some males would fight themselves in an empty room, and attracting females is just an excuse. Darwin uses the example of Helen of Troy, and this is pretty appropriate. We all know that sacking Troy wasn’t just about getting the woman back, it was about power and wealth and greed and a natural tendency to knobble each other at every available opportunity. Males compete because males have a lot more testosterone than females, and they have more testosterone because they are competing to thin out the competition from other males when they try to get a mate. It is the qualifying rounds, if you will.
It is the result of fighting, rather than the act of it which influences the female sexual selection. However, this may not be because females like winners, but because the loser is no longer able to join in the chase. Chasing after women is more difficult with broken legs, but it does not follow that women prefer males who break legs. He is just the only one chasing her. Now for males, this might seem like a single purpose: knobble the other guy to get the girl. This is the assumption of natural history programmes. For females, it is not singular. Males fight between themselves, and it has precious little to do with the female selection process, except to provide them with a whittled-down short-list. More on this later. Meanwhile, back in Descent, Darwin elaborates on this point, citing Hearne:
“” It has ever been the custom among these people for the men to wrestle for any woman to whom they are attached; and, of course, the strongest party always carries off the prize. A weak man, unless he be a good hunter, and well-beloved, is seldom permitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice. This custom prevails throughout all the tribes, and causes a great spirit of emulation among their youth, who are upon all occasions, from their childhood, trying their strength and skill in wrestling””(p.855).
Although this looks as if it is justification for cross-cultural universality in fighting for sexual selection, it isn’t. The difference is that the male is pro-active gender rather than the female. The male takes a notion that he wants a particular woman, and so he knobbles the competition, even if it is someone else’s partner. Note also that this is called a ‘custom’ rather than a genetic imperative. Customs do evolve, sure. Dawkins calls them memes. However, this does not mean that males fighting is a sexual selective trait. If it was, then males would all have to fight before coitus, and plainly that is not the case. Like I said, we are not all at the boxing ring looking for our next sexual adventure, and we are most of us capable of being sexually attracted to a man who really doesn’t want to fight anybody or anything ever. Indeed, it could be argued that this fighting knobbles the pacifist competitors in favour of the aggressive ones.
Also note that if the female were sexually selected by males, then it would be the females fighting for the attention of males. Yes, yes, we all know that we compete, but Darwin doesn’t. Female competition is not a prime plot line in Descent. Which is a shame, because that would have been more in keeping with his assertions further in the chapter. As it is, what is being said here is that males compete for the females that the males choose as partners. This is known in the vernacular as (you guessed it) “having your cake and eating it”: being both the gender selecting the mate, and the one competing for it. Females are denied both sides of the sexual selection role. They are neither the competitors nor the selectors: they are the trophy.
Darwin believes that fighting is a sexual selection because males have bigger muscles than females, but that this is not down to women being lazy (at least in ‘savage’ tribes like the Australians [sorry, that is just too funny not to include]). However he does go on to suggest that:
“With civilised people the arbitrament of battle for the possession of the women has long ceased; on the other hand, the men, as a general rule, have to work harder than the women for their joint subsistence, and thus their greater strength has been kept up” (p.857).
In other words, going out to earn a living is basically a lot harder work physically than being a housekeeper and mother. Hands up the mothers thinking “dream on”. We can be pretty sure that Darwin: a) didn’t bother asking mothers, and b) never tried it out himself. Moving on.
The next section in the chapter of Descent is entitled: “Difference in the Mental Powers of the two Sexes”. After listing a number of animals where there are differences in the “disposition” of the genders, Darwin states that:
“Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness…Woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she would often extend them towards her fellow creatures. Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily to selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright (pp.857-858)
Are these the same women as the ones who are choosing the winners in the competitions? If women are more tender and less selfish, and this passes from their childrearing to all areas of life, then aggression and violence in males don’t seem like good qualities in a mate. Who would like to be the one volunteering to tell females who suffer from domestic violence that they have made the best sexual selection, and that they are genetically predisposed to select the most violent, aggressive males they can find? Or is it being suggested that males only ever fight other males? Maybe there are two kinds of violence: one for sexual selection, and the other for beating up the women-folk. That must be it. It couldn’t possibly be because he is more selfish and will simply beat up anyone in his way, even though Darwin just said he was, because that would mean that beating people up is just a plain old trait, not a sexual selection by the female.
However, just when you might think Darwin was actually complimenting females on their softer side, he goes and says this:
“It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation” (p.858).
So, civilised = selfish, brutal competitiveness; and savage, lower state of civilisation = intuitive, rapid perception. Ok, so the word ‘bankster’ is going through my head right now. I wonder why. Could it be that the floor of stock exchanges could be more in tune with the description of ‘civilisation’ than the ‘savage’ one?
So, what we have here is a situation where males are both the competitors and the selectors of females, and that their greater selfish competitiveness is an indicator of highly evolved civilisation. Welcome to patriarchy, where the traits necessary to nurture and grow the children males fight so hard to get are described as a lower state of civilisation. At this point of reading, my emotions go from “idiot!” to “bastard!”
It starts to get personal, being called a lower state of civilisation.
Let me make this clear: in terms of evolutionary success, it is really not helpful to be beaten up on by males when you are trying to bring up children. A mother who has a black eye might not be able to watch out for the welfare of those children as well as a mother who is loved and cosseted by her male mate. Therefore, domestic violence is not only repugnant in itself, it is counter-evolutionary. Perpetrators of domestic violence reduce their chances of evolutionary success because they are handicapping their offspring through handicapping their mother, asshole. Even if we go along with the notion that mothering is all that a woman is good for (and I am not saying that it is) and that women are by nature less selfish and more intuitive (and I am not saying that they are), and males all have a desperate, primal urge to produce offspring (and I am not saying they all do), then the argument still stands. Handicapping mothers is self-defeating in the reproduction stakes. Civilisation and higher states of being in evolutionary terms (as well as others) is surely the opposite of selfish competition: it is care centred round the mother in order to gain most benefits for their offspring. Good grief, the positive impact of the assistance of the extended kinship group is a sub-set of evolutionary psychology. If males are, as Darwin suggests, less capable of providing altruistic care, then perhaps they are not intended to be part of a child/mother-centred household. Perhaps they are a transient element like FedEx: delivering the necessary goods then leaving.
Can’t be nice?
Can’t be here.
If that is not hurtful enough, immediately following the above quote, Darwin goes on to say that:
“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can women – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work, Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in a man must be above that of woman. Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy”. (p.858)
Sorry – this is a long quote, but I really can’t stop here – it goes on:
“With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles. They have, also, in the case of mankind, to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, or to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely: observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life. Consequently in accordance with the principle often alluded to, we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood. Now, when two men are put into competition, or a man with a woman, both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, perseverance, and courage, the latter will generally become more eminent in every pursuit, and will gain the ascendancy. He may be said to possess genius- for genius has been declared by a great authority to be patience and patience, in this sense, means unflinching, undaunted perseverance. But this view of genius is perhaps deficient; for without the higher powers of the imagination and reason, no eminent success can be gained in many subjects. These latter faculties, as well as the former, will have been developed in man, partly through sexual selection – that is through the contest of rival males……” (pp.858-859)
(Sorry for interrupting, but I just wanted to stop there and repeat that the contest between rival males is not a pro-active sexual selection by the female, but the act of “being a trophy”)
“…and partly through natural selection….many of our mental faculties by sexual selection….notoriously undergo a considerable change at puberty, and…eunuchs remain throughout life inferior in these same qualities. Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to women as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen” (pp.859-860)
Darwin goes on to talk about how females might just manage to get up to a standard of intellectual capacity close to the average male if she was intensively trained, but this would leave no time for giving birth to lots of children. Sadly, then, we will likely be perennially inferior to males in intellectual capacity.
Angry yet? Let me help you along a little by taking you out of the nineteenth century for a moment, and into the twenty-first century, just so that we can see how much stuff has changed.
In the year 2000, Larry Summers, who was then Dean at Harvard, said pretty much the same thing about females in the science department: that they were not suited to the rigours of the hard sciences. Yes, really – Google it. The reason I am giving Darwin’s diatribe-masking-as-theory so much attention is that this view has not gone away. One hundred and fifty years later and females still only make up a minority of engineering and business studies, and in the boardroom, for example (Davis, 2011 etc). Parkin (1996) notes that early neurocognitive researchers thought that the right hemisphere of the brain (assumed to be the intuitive, touchy feely side as opposed to the rational, logical left hemisphere) was not considered to be worth studying because it was just so much dead weight in terms of intelligence. That wasn’t Parkin’s view, but posited as an explanation of how a pervasive gender inequality can influence modern research assumptions.
Yes, of course, some stuff has changed. But this is the attitude evolutionary psychology was built on. When Miller (2001) wrote The Mating Mind, he argued that the brain evolved as a sexual selection by the female, and that intelligence and language in males were sexually attractive to females. In fact, Miller says that women developed brains to appreciate male intelligence. I kid you not.
Miller is a step forward, because he at least tries to put some sort of case for sexual selection by the female, but he still perpetuates the same opinion that males are intellectually superior to females. Yes, it is true that males have a wider bandwidth of intelligence tests: there are more males at the lower and higher end of cognitive performance tests. However, the validity of intelligence tests is something that we will discuss with the rest of cognition in Chapter ().
Do you notice that the same ‘have your cake and eat it’ trick is pulled when deciding what traits should be sexually selected by females? That is, where males have a trait, it is a good sexual selection trait, but where females have the trait it is not. Females are not asked which traits they prefer, or Goddess forbid, let them get on with choosing the sexually attractive traits for themselves. They might choose ones that males didn’t like having, such as altruism and cooperation. Aggressive, intelligent, selfish, competitive males aren’t likely to be asking, because they are selfish and competitive. They are competing with women to have the sexual selection traits that count. They are insisting that they are the king of the castle, so what they have is tautologously superior. Just because they have it.
This type of dominance is likely to increase to the point where males become increasingly picky about females. This increase in pickiness from males would lead to sexually selected traits in females, and this is the case under patriarchy. This does not pass Darwin by. In discussing the influence of beauty on mate choice, Darwin notes that:
“In civilised life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance.” (p.873)
He goes on to describe a wide variety of preferences and physical adornments and mutilations commonplace in a large number of different areas of the world, including both less developed countries and highly developed ones, such as Japan. There are descriptions of both male and female preferences, which is developed over fifteen pages, and his conclusion is that there is a wide variety of definitions of beauty between cultures. He notes that tastes differ widely, often based on what the locals are used to experiencing, such as the shape of features, and he suggests that where a trait is considered to be beautiful, individuals will go to extreme lengths – up to and including mutilation – to exaggerate these qualities. Indeed, it could be argued that had Darwin anticipated surgical breast augmentation or trout lips, he may have included plastic surgery as an example of these practices. He concludes that beauty is not easily defined, and that males tend towards novelty. He quotes Bichat, saying that:
“…if everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characteristics a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.”
Although Darwin reports on both male and female preferences when discussing other cultures, he reverts to the preferences of males in ‘civilised’ countries. He does describe physical attributes in terms of sexual selection, but as a male sexual selection in females, not the reverse. Males are “charmed” by female physical qualities. I am not sure whether this is before or after they have fought for possession of them. Maybe they only fight for the females they are charmed by, and that these charms are not just beautiful in themselves, but are unusual and novel. This is an important point. Evolutionary psychologists argue that symmetry of features is beautiful. What Darwin is saying that it is novelty: that which is unusual, whatever it is. I am with Darwin on this one, and this will be discussed at greater length in Chapter (). However, in the meantime, what Darwin is saying is that human females are judged on their external appearance in the same way male peacocks are. If this is the case, then he is suggesting that human males sexually select human females. As well as competing for them. Another having your cake and eating it moment? Oh, I think so.
I believe Darwin is expressing something quite common still: females are judged more by their appearance than males are. Have you ever heard the saying that males are more “visual” than females? Ok, so you might be saying something along the lines of “No shit, Sherlock” at this point. However, there are implications which arise from this:
a) Patriarchy over several thousand years may have resulted in the development of sexually selected attributes in females with regard to physical appearance. This is particularly true of fleshy parts such as breasts, but could also be influential in terms of attributes such as height, waist and hip sizes, hairiness, or foot size.
b) It could also have had a negative impact on female personality or intellectual capacity, where docile or compliant females were preferentially sexually selected.
c) The continuous and ubiquitous reinforcement of ideals of physical appearance on females can serve as a meme which, over the centuries, develops to the point where this type of sexual selection by the male seems natural, rather than a by-product of patriarchy.
So what evidence do I have for saying that sexual selection in humans as described by Darwin is grounded in patriarchy? Well, Darwin says so himself:
“With mankind, especially with savages, many causes interfere with the action of sexual selection as far as the bodily frame is concerned. Civilised men are largely attracted by the mental charms of women, by their wealth, and especially by their social position; for men rarely marry into a much lower rank.” (p.893).
Now for the moment we will overlook Darwin’s change of mind as to the primary traits of attractiveness in women from their physical appearance to their mental charms. What we are concentrating on is the notion that the social system influences mate selection. Darwin even suggests that females make the same kinds of socially-based choices:
“With respect to the opposite form of selection, namely, of the more attractive men by the women, although in civilised nations women have free or almost free choice, which is not the case with barbarous races, yet their choice is largely influenced by the social position and wealth of the men; and the success of the latter in life depends much on their intellectual powers and energy, or on the fruits of these same powers in their forefathers.” (p.893)
Again, there are issues to be raised as to the supposed free choice of women in Darwinian times (we are talking 1860s here). However, if we put that to one side for the moment, he is claiming that sexual selection by the female is also bound up in cultural practices and preferences. Indeed, we can see that old cliché appearing, where females select males for their money and power.
Let me make this clear: I am in no way suggesting that females in the 1860s were any more ignorant or shallow than I am. In a society where women could do very little to steer their own course through life, a good marriage could make a huge difference. Read or watch any Jane Austen to figure that one out. They made the best job they could with the options they had available to them, end of. What I am saying is that if you are in that position, the social norms of the day are masking – if not downright skewing – the natural inclinations of women when choosing a mate. Their choices have been narrowed down by society to the point where, over time, these social decisions alter the natural course of mate selection. The interesting bit that we all get heated up about is which selection processes are purely cultural and which ones would have happened anyway in the wild.
What we can be sure of is that females did not select males in the wild on the basis of their inherited wealth. How do we know this? Because fifty pound notes are not physically attached to men, and they do not begin to excrete them at puberty, along with their breaking voices and hairy faces. Wealth in terms of bank balances and estates can be inherited, but not genetically.
There is a case for claiming that inherited wealth and position do account for the male being better fed, better looked after, and generally given all the advantages their family can muster, and this is very likely to make a difference in their general appearance: good skin, good teeth, etc. So if women were sexually selecting men on their physical attributes such as skin and teeth, then we could say that wealth and power were valid indirect forms of sexual selection. However, if you take this argument to its logical conclusion – as Darwin does – you come out at a point where royal families should be the pinnacle of health and beauty:
“Many persons are convinced, as it appears to be with justice, that our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to the European standard, than the middle classes…..” (p.894)
Again, put to one side the notion that Darwin can’t make up his mind whether physical or social attributes are sexually selected. He goes on to reject the notion of general health and fitness through parental care:
“…. yet the middle classes are placed under equally favourable conditions of life for the perfect development of the body” (p.894)
In other words, Darwin is suggesting that parental care cannot be the whole story. He goes on to describe pockets of beauty and ugliness from a variety of cultures and societies. At this point we need to remember that Darwin had previously said that beauty was subjective, and was open to the forces of change through a desire for novelty or geographical location. Now he is saying that beauty can be enhanced through many generations of inheritance, disregarding the notion that the definition of beauty is likely to change over time. The only way in which Darwin could be correct here is if the aristocracy were somehow able to predict the direction of the definition of beauty fifteen years in advance. This is because the beauty of the individual in terms of sexual selection needs to appear at puberty. A child who has beautiful parents in one time or place has to gamble that the standards of beauty will not have radically changed in the intervening period. Take Prince Charles’s ears. Large ears may have been considered to be beautiful when he was born sixty years ago. They may have been seen as a sign of superior genetic development, and preferentially sexually selected by females. At the time of giving birth to his offspring, he would hope that his sons would have big ears, as this would mean that they, too, would be preferentially sexually selected by females for physical attributes rather than social status. But if the fashion for big ears changes in the time between the son being born and reaching puberty, the son will no longer be preferentially sexually selected by females.
The notion that parents are able to pick and choose the attributes their offspring have will be a subject that we will pick up again in greater detail, but for the meantime, even if they could, it might not be any help to their offspring in the evolutionary ‘beauty contest’ in the next generation.
Marriage
Darwin then turns his attention on the types of relationships in different regions at different times. He notes that sexual selection only needs to occur on a very temporary basis between the male and the female for the purposes of coitus to pregnancy. He also suggests that the wide variety of types of relationships in different regions points to the notion that the ideal of lifelong monogamy as practiced in the West is not being held up as the ‘right’ way. On the contrary, he suggests that the prevalence of ‘communal’ forms of relationships in less developed societies points to these forms being more ‘natural’ than monogamy. Indeed, he quotes Lubbock in suggesting that:
“…in old times high honour was bestowed on women who were utterly licentious; and this….is intelligible, if we admit that promiscuous intercourse was…long revered custom in the tribe….marriage, in any strict sense of the word, has been gradually developed; and that almost promiscuous or very loose intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world. (p.900)
Little gems like this are what makes Darwin worthwhile for me. When he follows his own line of logic and goes with the flow, he says some seriously outrageous things for his time. Unfortunately he goes on to say that he has difficulty with this notion, because jealousy would get in the way. Similarly, he says that:
“…the males of some species are monogamous, but live during only a part of the year with the females” (p.900)
So what we have here is Darwin approaching the problem of the ‘unnaturalness’ of lifelong monogamy which was utterly dominant in his own cultural context. The evidence he is gathering tells him that promiscuity and temporary mating partnerships is likely to have been the norm, and even when animals were monogamous, they only lived together a part of the time. The way he squares this is by suggesting that jealousy between males tends to make polygamous states “extremely improbable”. (p.901). That is, although it is quite possible to envisage a single man with a lot of wives, it is not possible for a woman to live with several husbands. The men-folk would get to beating each other up for hierarchical position very quickly. This, of course, assumes that females don’t get jealous of each other, or that their preferences mean so little that female jealousy isn’t worth talking about.
His ‘third way’ conclusion is that males who do not have harems would tend to be more nomadic than females, getting coitus where they can, and then disappearing off into the sunset. Ok. I can go with that a bit of the way: males do get jealous and they are likely to end up fighting over women. However, if we are going to go with this version, then we need to be clear that nomadic males are not identifiable fathers. If they want to be identified as a father, then they need to stick around and guard the female from any other male until they are sure that she is pregnant. Without a pregnancy test, this could take a while – pregnancy doesn’t show up for months, and no-one is saying that the woman feels obliged to tell the male, never mind reassure his ego that he is the father of the potential child.
In other words, coitus may produce babies, but that is not why we do it. And this is important: separating sex from babies means that the reasons we chose a specific sexual partner may have nothing to do with the genetic advantages bestowed on our children. Why would I say that? Oh, I don’t know…contraception, maybe? Homosexual sex? Sex after menopause? In chapter four, we are going to go into theories such as the dual strategy theory, which marks the point at which evolutionary hypothesists begin to tackle the issue of female infidelity. The way theorists attempt to reduce female sexual selection to reproductive advantage is truly comical to me, and I hope I can convey the sense in which males in the evo industry have bent over backwards not to say that women select mates just because they like the look of them for sexual purposes, not because they want babies. This is a concept which has been very difficult for them, poor dears. That does not mean, however, that I am going to go easy on them. Hell no. I owe it to Jane Austen to take the argument to them, and do my best to take it to bits. Of course, I don’t have to enjoy doing it. It just so happens that I do.
Refusal often offends
Something that is notable by its absence in Descent is the notion that females can refuse to copulate. This is important, because the refusal influences the male’s chances of getting his evolutionary powers into the next generation. A refusal is tantamount to telling the male that he is doomed to be the last of his line, and all that surviving and fighting over her were for nothing. This, dear readers, is the power of female sexual selection. Ok, so I am going to argue that male researchers asking females if they want as much coitus as males are ridiculous deviations from methodological validity and reliability. However, I retain the right to refuse coitus, even with the winner! (shock, horror). In Darwinian sexual selection theory, this just doesn’t happen. As we discussed above, the fighting and the possession of the female tend to be viewed as a single activity, and so one follows naturally on from the other. Winners get laid, QED. However, if we take an extreme example to illustrate this point, what about the soldiers who win a war, and then go on to rape the female population of the losing side? This works perfectly well under Darwinian sexual selection: battle for possession of the females. Job done.
So why don’t we think that war rape is ok? Because the illusion of female pro-action in the selection process has been removed. She isn’t selecting the male because she thinks he is the best guy around, he has decided that for her. For most peaceable people nowadays, it is important that females have the capacity to reject a sexual advance, at least in legal terms. But deep down in Darwinian sexual selection, it’s not the done thing. If we refuse a male, we are messing up that nice neat theory where the winners of struggles get the girl. In other words, the power to say no is the ultimate female evolutionary power. It is being the trophy who refuses to be passively handed to the winning team.
Is there evidence for the notion that females refuse winners? I am glad you asked. Why, yes. Yes, there is. There is even evidence from non-human species where the female selects the loser in a battle in more than one species. But there is a more compelling reason: there are ‘nice guys’ around. For our current purposes, ‘nice guys’ are the ones who want to help mum raise the kids in the best way possible. Nice guys are the kind of men who take on adoptive children just in order to be a dad, because they believe that being part of a family is really cool.
The ‘nice guy’ is not my invention. It has been used in evolutionary theory to differentiate between the males who simply impregnate a woman and leave her to it, and the men who stick around and help bring up the kids. Some theories which differentiate between the ‘nice guy’ and the ‘jerk’ are more plausible than others, and I will leave you to decide which ones you prefer as we go along. However, in the meantime, this differentiation suggests that there are at least two types of male. Where do these men come from? Well, they might be competing covertly about who can be the nicest partner by showering their partner with love and attention. Cool – I am all for that, and I believe that this is not an unusual or undesirable state. However, altruism of this sort is something that evolutionary theorists have some problems with, because it doesn’t seem to have any evolutionary purpose. Evolution is served by being selfish and competitive, right?
And besides, if the guys getting the girls are the big hairy bruiser types who have beaten the competition to a pulp, how come their offspring are not all big hairy bruisers too?
As we go on through popular evolutionary theorising, I would like you to keep it in the back of your mind that very few of these theories consider the half of the genome we acquire from our mothers, and how little it matters to evolutionists. If Darwin is right, and females are indeed more intuitive and loving, why is it so improbable that male children acquire some of their mother’s personality? Answers on a postcard.