The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (39 page)

gatherers, our ancestors must have been relatively lithe, fit enough to run after game or away from predators, and strong enough to carry animal carcasses or infants long distances.

Sports as Fitness Indicators

This discussion of bodily condition brings us to our first example of a human mental ability that evolved through sexual selection: the capacity for sports. The ability to invent and appreciate new ways of displaying physical fitness is a distinctly human ability. The ritualized behaviors evolved by other animals to intimidate sexual rivals and attract mates almost always include costly, hardto-fake indicators of physical condition. Male red deer roar at each other as loud as they can, showing off their size and energy. Usually, the weaker, quieter one gives up quickly. But sometimes the two are so closely matched that they roar for hours until endurance rather than strength decides the contest. As in other species, male humans participate much more often in competitive sports than females. But every human culture invents different sports. We inherit the physical capacities and motivations to learn sports, not the specific genes for football, siding, or boxing.

Sports depend on rules. These prevent competitors from killing each other, as they might in ordinary sexual competition. Even a boxer must not take off his gloves, bite the opponent's ears, or hit below the belt where his opponent's genetic future hangs. Referees are supposed to stop athletic contests before injuries escalate into permanent debility or death. There are also rules for clearly determining who wins and who loses. Each sport could be viewed as a system for amplifying minor differences in physical fitness into easily perceivable status differences, to make sexual choice easier and more accurate. In this sense, sports are culturally invented indicators of physical fitness.

To a game theorist, many human sports look odd because the rules do not specify what the winner actually wins. In game

theory, games are defined by a set of players, a set of possible strategies governed by rules, and a set of payoffs that specify what happens when somebody wins. Without specifying the payoffs,

the game is meaningless. Modern professional sports offer monetary prizes. But almost no sport in traditional human cultures involves material or monetary prizes. One could say that the winners win "status," but what does that mean? Unless status translates into survival or reproductive benefits, it means nothing to evolution. I suspect that the rewards of winning were mostly reproductive during human evolution. Athletic ability is clearly valued in mate choice, and young people seeking mates are motivated to play competitive sports. This is why the payoff is left implicit for most sports. No referee could force a female to mate with a male winner. The sexual payoff could not be specified as part of the rules, because it still depended on individual mate choice. It was enough for sports competitors to understand that winners were more likely to attract high-quality sexual partners—as in the stereotype of the American high-school football captain dating the homecoming queen.

Sports rules are considered "fair" insofar as they produce the highest correlation between a competitor's fitness and his or her likelihood of winning. Fair rules make sports good fitness indicators; bad rules and rule violations undermine the correlation between winning and fitness. Boys learning to play sports argue endlessly about rules and their interpretation. Girls argue much less about rules, and tend to play less competitively, more often avoiding games with clear winners and losers. Adults playing sports care intensely about rule violations. If sports were just arbitrary cultural pastimes, why should competitors care so much about developing good rules? Fundamentally, I think they care about rules because they have a shared interest in presenting the sport as a good fitness-indicator to observers of the opposite sex. Obviously, competitors have conflicting interests in terms of who wins. But they all want their sport to be perceived as "cool," so that winning yields social status and sexual rewards. Cool sports like downhill skiing use good rules and clear outcomes to advertise major components of heritable fitness like strength, endurance, agility, and intelligence. Cool team sports such as volleyball also advertise the social intelligence abilities that allow a team to

cooperate effectively. (Many modern sports are also cool in that they demand expensive equipment that makes them good wealth-indicators.) This obsession with rules and coolness reveals the importance of sexual choice in the evolution of sports.

In many tribal societies there is overlap between competitive sports, fighting, and warfare. All are ritualized and rule-governed to some degree. The rules usually emerge as social conventions for minimizing the risk of death from sexual competition over resources, territories, and status. In tribal warfare especially, there is always the temptation to violate the rules of engagement since dead enemies cannot report one's treachery to other tribes. But for competitions within a tribe, the rules governing fights can be enforced socially. Once we understand this continuum of sexual selection between male competitive sports and male fighting, it no longer seems so strange that men risk their lives and limbs in dangerous sports like motor racing, mountain climbing, and kickboxing. Males of all mammalian species risk their lives in ritualized sexual competition. We humans have invented thousands more ways of doing so, using our unique mental capacities to understand and follow the rules of sporting competition. As with other sexually selected behaviors, we do not need to know that sports evolved for a sexual display function in order to reap the reproductive benefits of manifest athletic skill.

There is almost no evolutionary psychology research on the mental adaptations underlying the human capacity for sports. For now, I can only make some guesses. In both sexes, there must be psychological adaptations for inventing, imitating, and participating in sports. Given children's high level of spontaneous motivation to learn and play sports, as distinct from learning to fight or play in other ways, I would assume that these adaptations are probably specific to sport, and not a side-effect of more general learning mechanisms. There must also be motivational systems for allocating energy and effort to athletic displays depending on who is watching and who else is playing. There must be cognitive systems that can invent the rules that govern sports, detect violations of those rules, and punish violators. We also seem to

have a very flexible ability to make unconscious inferences about someone's physical fitness from their athletic displays, even when we have never seen a particular sport before. Such a general ability to make attributions about physical fitness given novel displays may explain why it was possible for so many different sports to emerge in different cultures.

Sports are the intersection of mind and body, nature and culture, competition and mate choice, physical fitness and evolutionary fitness. Sports advertise general aspects of bodily health and condition that are shared by both sexes, not just specific sexual ornaments like beards and breasts. An Olympic medal in swimming can be more sexually attractive than erotic dancing because swimming is a better fitness indicator. Sports evolved through sexual selection, but they are not crude sexual displays.

Sexual selection for the human body was not restricted to sexual ornaments. Once the capacity for sports evolved, sexual choice could favor fit bodies over unfit bodies much more directly. Evolutionary psychology needs to expand its analysis of physical beauty to embrace behavioral displays of physical fitness like sports. We need to be able to explain why women find champion sprinter Linford Christie's astounding speed and form attractive, even when they are used to run from one arbitrary place to another exactly 100 meters away, to no apparent biological purpose.

Sport Utility Vehicles?

Until recently, science and medicine have viewed the human body as a machine that evolved for its survival utility. In
The Selfish Gene
, Richard Dawkins proposed a radically evolutionary view of the body as a vehicle that carries its genes from one generation into the next. A sexual selection analysis views the body as an instrument for displaying physical fitness through costly displays like copulatory courtship and a huge variety of sports. Can weplayfully—combine these utility, vehicular, and sports views and consider the human body a sort of sport utility vehicle (SUV)? The metaphor seems apt because SUVs make such a show of their rugged utility, all-terrain capability, enormous power, and

absurd size. They pretended to be practical, but for most owners in America and Europe, they are just the latest form of conspicuous consumption. They are a status display that just happens to follow a utilitarian aesthetic. And, of course, they follow the handicap principle. Their huge size demonstrates the ability to incur a high initial cost, and their large engine demonstrates the ability to incur high running costs due to poor mileage. Although capable of transporting six adults across a mountain range, they are often used for nothing more demanding than driving one's toddler to and from day-care, through leafy suburbia. To some extent, their size looks like the outcome of a runaway arms race for vehicular safety. If everyone else is driving an SUV, one is no longer safe in an ordinary-sized car, so must buy an SUV oneself. But it would be a mistake to view the SUV phenomenon as simply an escalation of competitive crash-worthiness. Principally, their size is a wealth-indicator. The change from the original SUV utilitarian aesthetic into the recent SUV aesthetic of luxury ornamentation reveals that fact.

The human body seems to have evolved along similar lines. At first glance, it looks and acts like a utility vehicle evolved for survival. It looks as if it grew larger throughout the Pleistocene under the pressure of male sexual competition, because smaller males were not as safe for their genes to ride around in. But the proliferation of sexual ornamentation on our bodies suggests that sexual choice was also at work. This is especially clear for the male body. Its great size, fuel-hungry metabolism, and ability to burn energy in sports reveals a history of female choice for indicators of physical fitness. The demands of pregnancy and mothering did not permit the human female body to be quite so profligate, but women's bodies also show a set of fitness indicators that evolved through male mate choice. Our bodies evolved as sport utility vehicles for sexual display, not as the easiest way to carry the tools for hunting and fishing. Perhaps our minds evolved along the same pseudo-utilitarian lines. In the next chapter we shall see how sexual choice has given us the behavioral abilities and aesthetic tastes to extend our sexual ornamentation from our bodies to our works of art.

8

Arts of Seduction

Art has always been a puzzle for evolutionists. Michelangelo's
David
seems singularly resistant to the universal acid of Darwinism, which is otherwise so efficient at dissolving the cultural into the biological. Like any nouveau-riche connoisseur, we are both proud of our art and ashamed of our ancestry, and the two seem impossible to reconcile.

The evolution of art is hard to explain through survival selection, but is a pretty easy target for sexual selection. The production of useless ornamentation that looks mysteriously aesthetic is just what sexual selection is good at. Artistic ornamentation beyond the body is a natural extension of the penises, beards, breasts, and buttocks that adorn the body itself. We shall begin our tour of the human mind with a look at our artistic instincts for producing and appreciating aesthetic ornamentation that is made by the hands rather than grown on the body.

Our shift of art makes a turning point in this book. So far we have been considering generalities: sexual selection theory in general, and how sexual selection shaped the human mind and body in general. It is time to turn to specific mental adaptations to see whether the sexual choice theory can explain particular aspects of human psychology. The rest of this book is devoted to four human capacities: art, morality, language, and creativity. They will serve as case studies. Each has proven difficult to account for as a survival adaptation. We might make more progress by asking whether each may have evolved originally as a courtship adaptation. Of course, in modern life none are used exclusively for courtship, but they still show enough hallmarks of

sexual selection for us to be able to trace their origin to the sexual choices made by our ancestors.

Art as an Adaptation

In her books
What Is Art For?
and
Homo Aestheticus,
anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake made one of the first serious attempts to analyze art as a human adaptation that must have evolved for an evolutionary purpose. She argued that human art shows three important features as a biological adaptation. First, it is ubiquitous across all human groups. Every culture creates and responds to clothing, carving, decorating and image-making. Second, the arts are sources of pleasure for both the artist and the viewer, and evolution tends to make pleasurable those behaviors that are adaptive. Finally, artistic production entails effort, and effort is rarely expended without some adaptive rationale. Art is ubiquitous, and costly, so is unlikely to be a biological accident.

Art fits most of the other criteria that evolutionary psychology has developed for distinguishing genuine human adaptations from non-adaptations. It is relatively fun and easy to learn. Given access to materials, children's painting and drawing abilities unfold spontaneously along a standard series of developmental stages. Humans are much better at producing and judging art than is any artificial intelligence program or any other primate. Of course, just as our universal human capacity for language allows us to learn distinct languages in different cultures, our universal capacity for art allows us to learn different techniques and styles of aesthetic display in different cultures. Like most human mental adaptations, the ability to produce and appreciate art is not present at birth. Very little of our psychology is "innate" in this sense, because human babies do not have to do very much. Our genetically evolved adaptations emerge when they are needed to deal with particular stages of survival and reproduction. They do not appear at birth just so psychologists can conveniently distinguish the evolved from the cultural. Beards have evolved, but they grow only after puberty, so are they "innate"? Is menopause "innate"? "Innateness" is a relatively useless concept