The Queen - Matt Ridley

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THE PEACOCK S TALE

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sor 's condition. Such tolerant pluralism is not to everybody 's taste, but Pomiankowski insists it does not stem from misguided desire to please everybody: On a paper napkin in an Indian restaurant one day he sketched out for me a plausible account of all the sexual selection theories working in concert.

Each male trait begins as a chance mutation: If it happens to hit a sensory bias of the female, it starts to spread. As it spreads, the Fisher effect takes over, and both the trait and the preference are exaggerated: Eventually the point is reached where the trait has spread to all males, and there is no point in females following the fashion anymore. It starts to fade again, under pressure from the fact that there is now a cost to female choice: if nothing else, it is a waste of females ' time and effort to compare different males: The Fisher effect fades more slowly when that cost is small—for example, in lekking species where the males can all be viewed at once.

But some traits do not fade because it so happens that they reflect the underlying health of their possessors—they change color if the male is infected with parasites, for example. And therefore females do not stop choosing the best males at all. They keep picking (or being seduced by) the fanciest male because if they do, they will have disease-resistant offspring: In other words, condition-reflecting traits will not be the only ones brought to an exaggerated state, but they will be the ones that persist the longest: And all the Fisher-exaggerated traits remain in lekking species as well because the cost of choosing is so small: The most promiscuous species end up a collage of different handicaps, ornaments, and gaudy blotches.

Pomiankowski has since begun to confirm his intuition (based on the symmetry idea discussed earlier) that multiple traits on polygamous birds, such as the many adornments of a peacock, are Fisher ornaments, while single features on monogamous birds, such as the swallow 's forked tail, are Good-gene ornaments, or condition-revealing handicaps. 80

The next time you visit a zoo in the spring, try to watch a male Lady Amherst pheasant from China posturing before a hen.

He is a riot of color: His face is pale green, his crest scarlet, his throat iridescent green, his back emerald, his rump orange, and his

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The Red Queen

belly pristine white: Around his neck is a white ruff trimmed with black, and at the base of his tail are five pairs of vermillion feathers: His tail, white barred with black, is longer than his body: A dull or damaged feather would stand out anywhere on his body: He is one great advertisement for good genes, handicapped by the need to keep clean, healthy, and out of danger, a walking illustration of his mate's evolved sensory biases:

THE HUMAN PEACOCK

The antics of peacocks and guppies are interesting enough in themselves to naturalists; to students of evolution they are intriguing as test cases; but to the rest of us what makes them worth studying is pure self-centeredness: We want to know what lessons they teach us about human affairs: Are some men successful with women because their appearance sends an honest signal of their handicapping good genes and their ability to resist disease?

The idea is ridiculous: Men succeed with women for much more varied and subtle reasons: They are kind or clever or witty or rich or good-looking or just available. Humans are simply not a lekking species. Men do not gather in groups to display for passing women: Most men do not abandon women immediately after copulation: Men are not equipped with gorgeous ornaments or stereotyped courtship rituals, however it may look in the average discotheque. When a woman chooses a man to mate with, she is less concerned with whether he can father sexy sons or disease-resistant daughters than whether he would make a good husband. A man choosing a wife uses equally mundane considerations, though he is perhaps more of a sucker for beauty: Both genders use criteria that bear on parental abilities. They are more like terns, who choose mates that can fish well, than sage grouse hens, who copy one another 's choice of a fast-displaying male. So the Red Queen race between the genders over seduction and sales resistance that follows from pure Good-gene choice does not happen: And yet we cannot be so categorical: There are species of THE PEACOCK ' S TALE

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mammal in which the effects of sexual selection are few and small.

It is hard to argue that the average rat has been endowed with conspicuous display'ornaments by the preferences of ancestral females: Even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are little touched by the effects of female choice: Males look much like females, and courtship is somewhat simple. But we should pause before dismissing the effects of sexual selection on human beings. People, after all, are universally interested in beauty. Lipstick, jewelry, eye shad-ow, perfume, hair dyes, high heels—people are just as willing to exaggerate or lie about their sexually alluring traits as any peacock or bowerbird: And as the list above makes clear, it seems as if men seek female beauty rather more than women seek male beauty. The human being, in other words, may be the victim of generations of male choice even more than female choice: If we are to apply sexual selection theory to man, it is male choice for female genes that we should examine. But it makes little difference: When one gender is being choosy, all the consequences of sexual selection theory inevitably flow: It is quite possible, even likely, as the next few chapters will reveal, that some parts of the human body and psyche have been sexually selected.

Chapter 6

POLYGAMY AND THE

NATURE OF MEN

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no

meaning:

—Aristotle Onassis

Power is a great aphrodisiac:

—Henry Kissinger

In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry: The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many "houses of virgins" throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor 's concubines: Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size: Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. "Principal persons " were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 1 00,000 people, twenty; leaders of I,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; gover-nors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the averagemale Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa 's women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.

As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men:

In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were

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at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to " marry "