The Queen - Matt Ridley

The depressing part of Darwin 's insight is that it shows how beauty cannot exist without ugliness: Sexual selection, Red Queen—style, is inevitably a cause of dissatisfaction, vain striving, THE USES OF BEAUTY

:::305 :::

and misery to individuals. All people are always looking for greater beauty or handsomeness than they find around them. This brings up yet another paradox. It is all very well to say that men want to marry beautiful women and women want to marry rich and powerful men, but most of us never get the chance. Modern society is monogamous, so most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already. What happens to Mr: and Ms. Average? They do not remain celibate; they settle for something second best. In black grouse the females are perfectionist, the males indiscriminate. In a monogamous human society, neither sex can afford to be either perfectionist or indiscriminate. Mr. Average chooses a plain woman, and Ms. Average chooses a wimp. They temper their idealist preferences with realism. People end up married to their equals in attractiveness: The homecoming queen marries the football hero; the nerd marries the girl in glasses; the man with mediocre prospects marries the woman with mediocre looks: So pervasive is this habit that exceptions stand out a mile: "What on earth can she see in him?" we ask of a model 's dull and unsuccessful husband, as if there must be some hidden clue to his worth that the rest of us have missed. "How did she manage to catch him? " we ask of a high-flying man married to an ugly woman.

The answer is that we each instinctively know our relative worth as surely as in Jane Austen's day people knew their place in the class system. Bruce Ellis showed how we manage this "assorta-tive mating " pattern: He gave each of thirty students a numbered card to stick on their foreheads. Each could now see the others '

numbers, but nobody knew his or her own: He told them to pair up with the highest number they could find. Immediately the person with 30 on her forehead was surrounded by a buzzing crowd, so she adjusted her expectations upward and refused to pair up with just anybody, settling eventually for somebody with a number in the high twenties: The person with number I, meanwhile, after trying to persuade number 30 of his worth, then lowered his sights and went progressively down the scale, steadily discovering his low status, until he ended up taking the first person who would accept him, probably number 2:4'

::: 306 :::

The Rtd Quttn

The game shows with uncomfortable realism how we measure our own relative desirability from others ' reactions to us.

Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher: But it is worth it to get off the Red Queen's treadmill before you drop: Chapter to

THE INTELLECTUAL

CHESS GAME

Were I (who to my cost already am

One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man: A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleased to weare, I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear: Or anything but that vain Animal,

Who is so proud of being rational:

The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive A Sixth, to contradict the other Five;

And before certain instinct, will preferr Reason, which Fifty times for one does err.

—John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

The time: 300,000 years ago: The place: the middle of the Pacific Ocean: The occasion: a conference of bottle-nosed dolphins to discuss the evolution of their own intelligence: The conference was being held over an area of about twelve square miles of ocean so that the participants could fish in between meetings; it was during the squid season: The sessions consisted of long soliloquies by invited speakers followed by a series of commentaries in Squeak, the language of Pacific bottle-noses. Squawk speakers from the Atlantic were able to hear memorized translations at night. The matter at issue was simple: Why did bottle-nosed dolphins have brains that were so much bigger than those of other animals? The bottle-nose brain was twice as large as that of many other dolphins.

The first speaker argued that it was all a matter of language: Dolphins needed big brains to enable them to hold in their heads the concepts and the grammar with which to express themselves: The ensuing commentaries were' merciless: The language theory solved nothing, said the commentators. Whales had complex language, and every dolphin knew how stupid whales were: Only the year before a group of bottle-noses had fooled an old humpback whale into attacking his best friend by sending out soliloquies about infidelity in humpback language: The second squeaker, a male, was more favorably received, for he argued that this was indeed the purpose of dolphin intelligence: to deceive: Are we not, he squeaked, the global masters of deception and manipulation? Do we not spend all our time scheming to outwit one another in the pursuit of female dolphins? Are we not the only species in which " triadic" interac-

::: 310 :::

The Red Queen

tions among alliances of individuals are known? The third speaker replied that this was all very laudable, but why us? Why bottle-nosed dolphins? Why not sharks or porpoises? There was a dolphin in the River Ganges whose brain weighed only five hundred grams.

A bottle-nose brain weighed fifteen hundred grams. No, he replied, the answer lay plainly in the fact that of all the creatures on earth, bottle-nosed dolphins were the ones that had the most varied and flexible diet: They could eat squid or fish or . . . well, all sorts of different kinds of fish: That variety demanded flexibility, and flexibility demanded a big brain tha ot could learn: The final speaker of the day was scornful of all his predecessors: If social complexity was what required intelligence, why were none of the social animals on land intelligent? The speaker had heard stories of an ape species that was almost as big-brained as dolphins; indeed, for its body size it was even bigger. It lived in bands on the African savanna and used tools and hunted meat as well as gathered plants for food: It even had language of a sort, though with none of the richness of Squeak. It did not, he squeaked drolly, eat fish.'

THE APE THAT MADE IT

Around 18 million years ago there were tens of species of ape living in Africa and many others in Asia: Over the next 15 million years most of them became extinct. A Martian zoologist who arrived in Africa about 3 million years ago would probably have concluded that the apes were bound for the trash heap of history, an outdated model of animal made obsolescent by competition with the monkeys. Even if he noticed that there was one ape, aclose relative of the chimpanzee, that walked on two feet, entirely upright, he would not have predicted much of a future for it: For its size, midway between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, the upright ape, known to science now as Australopithecus

afarensis and to the world as " Lucy, "2 had a " normal " brain size: about four hundred cubic centimeters—bigger than the modern THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

:::311 :::

chimp, smaller than the modern orangutan. Its posture was peculiarly humanlike, undoubtedly, but its head was not. Apart from its uncannily human legs and feet, we would not have had any trouble thinking of it as an ape. Yet over the next 3 million years the heads of its descendants exploded in size. Brain capacity doubled in the first 2 million years and almost doubled again in the next million, to reach the fourteen hundred cubic centimeters of modern people.