The Queen - Matt Ridley

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upright breasts, narrow waists, slender legs, even blond hair, which, without chemical intervention, rarely lasts beyond the twenties except among the most Viking of people. These things are, in the sense developed in chapter 5, honest handicaps: They tell a tale of age that cannot be easily disguised without surgery, makeup, or veils.

That blond hair :on a woman has been considered by Europeans more beautiful than brown or black has long been noted: In ancient Rome women dyed their hair blond. In medieval Italy fair hair and great beauty were inseparable. In Britain the words fair and beautiful were synonymous. Z° Blond adult hair may be a sexually selected honest handicap, just like a swallow 's tail streamers. Blond hair in children is a fairly common gene among Europeans (and, curiously, Australian aborigines). So when a mutation arose in the not-so-distant past, somewhere near Stockholm, say, for that blondness to last into adulthood but not beyond the early twenties, any men with a genetic preference for blond women would have found themselves marrying only young women, which—in a heavily clothed civilization—others might not have done. They would therefore have left more descendants, and a preference for blond hair would have spread: This in turn would have increased the spread of the trait itself because it was indeed an honest indicator of female reproductive value. Hence, gentlemen prefer blondes!'

Of course, the part about the male genetic preference is optional or, if you like, a parable: It is more probable that the preference for blond hair among northern European men, if it exists, is a cultural trait instilled in them unconsciously by the association between blondness and youth—an association, incidentally, that the cosmetic industry is rapidly undermining. But the effect is the same: a genetic change brought about by a sexual preference. The alternative theory is to suggest some natural reason for blond hair 's being advantageous—for example, that it goes with fair skin, and fair skin allows the absorption of ultraviolet light to help stave off vitamin D deficiency. But the skin is not much fairer in blond than in dark Swedes; truly fair skin goes with red hair, not blond.

Until recently, sexual selection was an argument of last resort, when appeals to natural selection by the "environment " had THE USES OF BEAUTY

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failed: But why should it be? Why is it more plausible to suggest that blond hair in Baltic people was selected by vitamin D deficiency than to suggest it was selected by sexual preferences? The evidence is beginning to accumulate that humanity is a highly sexually selected species and that this explains the great variations between races in hairiness, nose length, hair length, hair curliness, beards, eye color—variations that plainly have little to do with climate or any other physical factor. In the common pheasant, every one of forty-six isolated wild populations in central Asia has a different combination of male plumage ornaments: white collars, green heads, blue rumps, orange breasts. Likewise, in mankind, sexual selection is at work. 22

The male obsession with youth is characteristically human.

There is no other animal yet studied that shares this obsession quite as strongly: Male chimpanzees find middle-aged females almost as attractive as young ones as long as they are in season: This is obviously because the human habits of lifelong marriage and long, slow periods of child rearing are also unique. If a man is to devote his life to a wife, he must know that she has a potentially long reproductive life ahead of her: If he were to form occasional short-lived pair bonds throughout his life, it would not matter how young his mates were. We are, in other words, descended from men who chose young women as mates and so left more sons and daughters in the world than other men: 23

THE LEGS THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS

That many of the components of female beauty are clues to age, every woman and every cosmetic company well knows. But there is more to beauty than youth. The reasons that many youthful women are not beautiful are generally twofold: They are overweight or underweight, or their facial features do not fit our image of beauty.

Beauty is a trinity of youth, figure, and face.

A pop song from the 1970s included the cruelly sexist line

" nice legs, shame about the face. " The importance of regular, sym-

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metrical facial features is somewhat puzzling: Why should a man throw away a chance at mating with a young and fertile woman simply because she has a long nose or a double chin?

It is possible that facial features are a clue to genetic or nurtured quality, or to character and personality. Facial symmetry may well prove to be a clue to good genes or good health during development. 24 "The face is the most information-dense part of the body " is how Don Symons put it to me one day: And the less symmetrical a face, the less attractive. But asymmetry is not a common reason for ugliness; many people have perfectly symmetrical faces and yet are still ugly. The other noticeable feature of facial beauty is that the average face is more beautiful than any extreme: In 1883, Francis Galton discovered that merging the photographs of several women 's faces produced a composite that is usually judged to be better looking than any of the individual faces that went into making it:" The experiment has been repeated recently with computer-merged photographs of female undergraduates: The more faces that go into the image, the more beautiful the woman appears.26 Indeed, the faces of models are eminently forgettable.

Despite seeing them on the covers of magazines every day, we learn to recognize few individuals. The faces of politicians, not known for their beauty, are much more memorable: Faces that are "full of character " are almost by definition nonaverage faces. The more averageand unblemished the face, the more beautiful, but the less it tells you about its owner 's character.

This attraction to the average—to a nose that is neither too long nor too short, to eyes that are not too close together nor too far apart, to a chin that is neither prominent nor receding, to lips that are full but not too full, to cheekbones that are prominent but not absurdly so, to a face that is the average, oval shape, neither too long nor too broad—crops up throughout literature as a theme of female beauty. It suggests to me that a Fisherian sexy-son—or rather, in this case, sexy-daughter—effect is at work: Given the importance of facial beauty, a man who chooses an ugly-faced mate will probably have daughters that marry late or marry second-rate husbands: Throughout human history men have fulfilled their THE USES OF BEAUTY

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ambitions through their daughters ' looks: In societies with few other opportunities for social mobility, a great beauty could always marry above her station:" Of course women inherit their looks from their fathers as well as their mothers, so a woman should also prefer regular features in a man—and women mostly do.

All that the Fisher effect requires is for men to show a tendency to prefer the average face, and runaway selection will take over. Any man who deviates from the average preference has fewer or poorer grandchildren because his daughters are considered less beautiful than the average. It is a cruel, despotic fashion, one that enforces its pitiless logic at the expense of many a brilliant, kind, and accomplished woman who happens to be plain, and one that has ironically been made worse by the demographic transition to prescribed monogamy. In medieval Europe and in ancient Rome, powerful men took all the beauties into their harems, leaving a general shortage of women for the other men, so an ugly woman stood a better chance of eventually finding some man desperate enough to marry her. That may not sound very just, but justice is rarely the consequence of sexual selection.