The Queen - Matt Ridley

The first implication will be political: Although it raises the possibility of selective abortion by mothers who do not wish to have gay sons, the theory of the gay gene has been largely welcomed in recent years by homosexual activists: The reason is that they find it will convince their more stubborn detractors that homosexuality is a condition into which they were born rather than a choice they made: In the eyes of disapproving heterosexuals, it exculpates them, their parents, and their education for their sexual proclivity. It also relieves parents of any anxiety they might have that their son might be led into homosexuality simply because his favorite rock group consists of homosexuals or because he has been seduced by a homosexual during adolescence:

The second implication is moral: The gay gene would at last demolish the myth that there is something "better" and less evil about theories that ascribe conditions to nurture or environment than theories that ascribe them to innate nature: In the name of Freudian nurture theories, gays were once treated with aversion therapy—electric shocks and emetics accompanied by homoerotic images: The most compelling of the new evidence for the gay gene is that fraternal twins, carried in the same womb and reared in the

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same household, have only a one-in-four chance of being gay: Identical twins, on the other hand, with the same nurture and the same nature, have a one-in-two chance of being gay. If one identical twin is gay, the chances that his brother is also gay are 50 percent: There is also good evidence that the gene is inherited from the mother and not from the father:'

How could such a gene survive, given that gay men generally do not have children? There are two possible answers: One is that the gene is good for female fertility when in women, to the same extent that it is bad for male fertility when in men: The second possibility is more intriguing: Laurence Hurst and David Haig of Oxford University believe that the gene might not be on the X

chromosome after all: X genes are not the only genes inherited through the female line. So are the genes of mitochondria, described in chapter 4, and the evidence linking the gene to a region of the X chromosome is still very shaky statistically: If the gay gene is in the mitochondria, then a conspiracy theory springs to the devious minds of Hurst and Haig: Perhaps the gay gene is like those "male killer " genes found in many insects: It effectively sterilizes males, causing the diversion of inherited wealth to female relatives. That would (until recently at least) have enhanced the breeding success of the descendants of those female relatives, which would have caused the gay gene to spread: If the sexual preferences of gay men are greatly influenced (not wholly determined) by a gene, then it is probable that so are the sexual preferences of heterosexuals: And if our sexual instincts are heavily determined by our genes, then they have evolved by natural and sexual selection, and that means they bear the imprint of design: They are adaptive: There is a reason that beautiful people are attractive: They are attractive because others have genes that cause them to find beautiful people attractive. People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. Beauty is not arbitrary: The insights of evolutionary biologists are transforming our view of sexual attraction, for they have begun at last to suggest why we find some features beautiful and others ugly.

THE USES OF BEAUTY

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BEAUTY AS A UNIVERSAL

Botticelli's Venus is beautiful: Michelangelo 's David is handsome.

But were they always thus? Would a Neolithic hunter-gatherer have agreed? Do Japanese or Eskimo people agree? Will our great-grandchildren agree? Is sexual attraction fashionable and evanescent or permanent and inflexible?

We all know how dated and frankly unattractive the fashions and the beauties of a decade ago look now, let alone those of a century ago. Men in doublet and hose may still seem sexy to some, but men in frock coats surely do not. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a person 's sense of what is beautiful and sexy is subtly educated to prefer the prevailing norms of fashion. Rubens would not have chosen Twiggy as a model. Moreover, beauty is plainly relative, as any prisoner who has spent months without seeing a member of the opposite sex can testify.

And yet this flexibility stays within limits. It is impossible to name a time when women of ten or forty were considered "sexier " than women of twenty. It is inconceivable that male paunches were ever actually attractive to women or that tall men were thought uglier than short ones: It is hard to imagine that weak chins were ever thought beautiful on either sex. If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, gray hair, hairy backs, and very long noses have never been "in fashion "? The more things change, the more they stay the same. The famous sculpture of Nefertiti's head and neck, 3,300 years old, is as stunning today as when Akhenaten first courted the real thing.

Incidentally, in this chapter on what makes people sexually attractive to one another, I am going to take almost all my examples from white Europeans, and from northern Europeans at that. By this I am not implying that white European standards of beauty are absolute and superior but merely that they are the only ones I know enough about to describe. There is no room for a separate investigation into the standards of beauty that black, Asian, or other people employ. But the problem that I am principally concerned with is universal to all people: Are standards of beauty cultural whims or

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innate drives? What is flexible and what endures? I will argue in this chapter that only by understanding how sexual attraction evolved is it possible to make sense of the mixture of culture and instinct, and understand why some features flow with the fashion while others resist. The first clue comes from the study of incest: FREUD AND INCEST TABOOS

Very few men have sex with their sisters. Caligula and Cesare Borgia were notorious because they were (rumored to be) such exceptions.

Even fewer men have sex with their mothers, in spite of what Freud tells us is an intense longing to do so. Sexual abuse by fathers of daughters is far more common. But it is still rare.

Compare two explanations of these facts. First, that people secretly desire incest but are able to overcome these desires with the help of social taboos and rules; second, that people do not find their very close relatives sexually arousing, that the taboo is in the mind. The first explanation is Sigmund Freud ' s. He argued that our first and most intense sexual attraction is toward our oppositesex parent. That is why, he went on to say, all human societies impose on their subjects strict and specific taboos against incest: Since the taboo "is not to be found in the psychology of the individual, " there is a " necessity for stern prohibitions. " Without those taboos, he implied, we would all be dreadfully inbred and suffer from genetic abnormalities:'

Freud made three unjustified assumptions. First, he equat-ed attraction with sexual attraction. A two-year-old girl may love her father, but that does not mean she lusts after him. Second, he assumed without proof that people have incestuous desires. Freudians say the reason very few people express these desires is that they have "repressed" them—which makes Freud 's argument irrefutable.

Third, he assumed that social rules about cousins marrying were

" incest taboos. " Until very recently scientists and laymen alike followed Freud in believing that laws forbidding marriages between cousins were enacted to prevent incest and inbreeding. They may not have been.