The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (57 page)

How should we interpret the female superiority on language comprehension tests, given the male motivation to produce public verbal displays? The latter has not been so well quantified yet, but it is still obvious. Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men dominate mixed-sex committee discussions. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't

they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism—a costly, risky individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction. The fact that men often do not know what they are talking about only shows that the reach of their displays often exceeds their grasp.

Cyrano's Panache

The verbal fireworks of male courtship are personified in the tide character from Edmond Rostand's 1897 play
Cyrano de Bergerac.
Cyrano had a big nose, a big sword, and a big vocabulary. One might say they are all phallic symbols, but, given what we learned earlier about the penis, that would just identify them as sexually selected ornaments.

Much of the play concerns Cyrano's mission to convince his bookish, beautiful cousin Roxane to commit herself to the inarticulate but handsome baron Christian de Neuvillette. In preparing a translation of
Cyrano
for the New York stage in 1971, novelist Anthony Burgess noted of Roxane that "She loves Christian, and yet she rebuffs him because he cannot woo her in witty and poetic language. This must seem very improbable in an age that finds a virtue in sincere inarticulacy, and I was told to find an excuse for this near-pathological dismissal of a good wordless soldier whose beauty, on her own admission, fills Roxane's heart with ravishment." Our modern verbal displays remain a pale

imitation of classic French wit—Cyrano's quatrains have given way to our anodyne psychobabble, self-help platitudes, and management buzzwords. We can be linguistically lazy now because we are surrounded by professional wordsmiths who entertain our sexual partners on our behalf: television, movie, comedy, and novel writers. We may never know whether our Pleistocene ancestors favored French-style wit, English-style irony, or German-style engineering. But they apparently favored some verbal fluency beyond the demands of flint-knapping and berry-
picking.

The Cyrano story really illustrates verbal display by five males. First, the historical Cyrano de Bergerac: large-nosed 17th-century political satirist, wounded veteran, dramatist, free-thinking materialist, ridiculer of religious authority, and master of baroque prose and bold metaphors, whose
A Voyage to the Moon
of 1754 was arguably the first science-fiction novel. Second, the 19th-century playwright Edmond Rostand, whose dazzling versification throughout five acts of rhymed alexandrines secured his literary status. Third, Rostand's fictional character Cyrano, whose astonishing poetic fluency won Roxane's heart. Fourth, the play's translator, Anthony Burgess. Perhaps their lovers were equally fluent in private conversation, but we do not know, for they were not so motivated to broadcast their verbal genius to such wide audiences. The fifth male displayer is, of course, me, since I'm writing about Cyrano here. These endless chains of male verbal display constitute most of human literature and science.

Facing death at the end of the play, Cyrano's final words emphasized the similarities between ornamental bird plumage in nature, the white feather in his hat, and the style of his language:

There is one thing goes with me when tonight I enter my last lodging, sweeping the bright Stars from the blue threshold of my salute. A thing unstained, unsullied by the brute Broken nails of the world, by death, by doom Unfingered—See it there, a white plume

Over the battle—A diamond in the ash

Of the ultimate combustion—My panache.

His reputation for wit and valor will outlast his death—as would his genes for those virtues, if Roxane had not secluded herself in that convent. His death-speech is a rather moving evolutionary metaphor, with the white plume of sexual selection flying high above the battleground of natural selection. This is not to suggest that Rostand of 1897 had read Darwin of 1871, only that both recognized that there is more to life than swords and noses, and more to female choice than lust for good wordless soldiers.

Poetic Handicaps

Cyrano's panache was manifest in his poetry Literary souls sometimes praise poetry as a zone of linguistic freedom where words can swirl in dazzling flocks above the gray cityscape of pragmatic communication. A sexual selection viewpoint suggests a different interpretation. Poetry, in my view, is a system of handicaps.

Meter, rhythm, and rhyme make communication harder, not easier. They impose additional constraints on speakers. One must not only find the words to express meaning, but, to appropriate Coleridge, the right words with the right sounds in the right order and the right rhythm. These constraints make poetry more impressive than prose as a display of verbal intelligence and creativity For example, literary scholar John Constable has noted that poetic meter is a kind of handicap in Zahavi's sense. A metric line must have a regular number of syllables. Across different poetic styles, languages, and cultures, this number is usually between six and twelve syllables. Constable showed that even successful writers such as George Eliot have trouble composing metric poetry His evidence shows that on average they use shorter words when writing metric poetry than when writing prose, because shorter words are easier to fit together into regular line lengths. Meter imposes a measurable cost on the writer's verbal efforts, which makes it a good verbal handicap. Only those

with verbal capacity to spare can write good metric lines.

Often, poetry demands a regular rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables. This requires selecting words not only for their meaning and syllable number, but also for their stress pattern. Meter and rhythm are usually combined to form a double handicap. In iambic pentameter, for example, each line must be of exactly ten syllables, with alternating stresses on successive syllables. Moreover, poetry in many languages is expected to rhyme. Words must be selected so the last few phonemes (sound units) match across different lines. Rap musicians develop reputations largely for the ingenuity of their rhymes, especially the rhyming of rare, multi-syllabic words. Some poetic forms such as haiku, limericks, and sonnets also have constraints for the total number of lines (three, five, and fourteen, respectively). The most highly respected poetic forms such as the sonnet are the most difficult, because they combine all four rules, creating a quadruple handicap under which the poet must labor. Some poetic handicaps such as meter, rhythm, and rhyme are fairly universal across cultures, suggesting that our minds may have evolved some verbal adaptations for dealing with them. Specific forms of poetry are, of course, cultural inventions.

Good prose enhances the speaker's status. Good poetry is an even better indicator of verbal intelligence. This is why Cyrano was so impressive: we are clever enough to comprehend his wit, while acknowledging that we would have extraordinary difficulty matching it. If I had written this book in sonnets at Shakespeare's standard, you would not have understood human mental evolution any better, but you might have a higher opinion of my verbal ability.

In most cultures a substantial proportion of poetry is love poetry, closely associated with courtship effort. Poetry often overlaps with musical display, as in folk music with rhyming lyrics. Sung poetry demands the additional skill of holding a melody while maintaining meter, rhythm, rhyme, and line-number norms. In modern societies, poets who publish their work are little read, but poets who sing their work, backed up by guitars and

sequencers, sell millions of albums and attract thousands of groupies. In considering whether ancestral poetry would have been considered sexually attractive, do not visualize Wallace Stevens, my favorite modernist poet, a drab New Haven insurance executive who wrote in the evenings after work. Instead, visualize Frank Sinatra, Jim Morrison, Courtney Love, or whichever songwriter/vocalist happens to be fashionable when you are reading this.

Our capacity for poetic language probably evolved after our capacity for prose. If the ability to produce good love poetry had been strongly selected during courtship ever since modern
Homo sapiens
originated a hundred thousand years ago, we would be much better at it. We would speak effortlessly in rhyming couplets, and find that quatrains of trochaic septameter take only a little effort. But we have not yet evolved the ability to handle multiple poetic handicaps very easily. Indeed, some among us may still believe that Keats rhymes with Yeats. Of course, if we had all evolved to the standard of Cyrano, then sexual selection would raise its standard again, perhaps favoring only those whose trochaic septameter quatrains were composed of alliterative word-triplets. The exact nature and number of poetic handicaps do not matter. What counts is that they function as proper biological handicaps, discriminating between those whose verbal displays can follow the rules, and those without sufficient verbal intelligence to play these bizarre word-games. At the moment, the meter, rhythm, and rhyme handicaps are sufficient hurdles that few of us can clear them.

Clearly, this analysis of poetry as a system of sexually selected handicaps aims to explain why poetry originated; it does not claim to account for poetry's content or contemporary human significance. Good poetry offers emotionally moving insights into the human condition, the natural world, and the transience of life. These psychologically appealing aspects may make it a more effective courtship display than if it droned on about nothing more than sex. (Indeed, because courtship is a way to arouse

sexual interest in someone who is not already interested, courtship displays that make explicit reference to sex may be particularly unappealing.) Because humans are fascinated by many things, courtship displays can successfully appeal to human interests by talking about almost anything under the sun. This Darwinian account of poetry does not drain poetry of its meaning—on the contrary, it shows why its meaning is free to range over the entirety of human experience.

So Why Can't My Boyfriend Communicate?

For every word written in scientific journals about the evolution of our astonishing language ability, at least a hundred words have been written in women's magazines about men's apparent inability to articulate even the simplest thought or feeling. Women commonly complain that their sexual partners do not talk enough to them. If language evolved through sexual selection, and if sexual selection operates more powerfully on males than on females, you may legitimately wonder why your boyfriend or husband cannot share his feelings with you. Is it possible that, his early courtship efforts having brought success, he no longer feels driven to be as verbally energetic, interesting, and self-disclosing as he was before? The man who used to talk like Cyrano now talks like a cave-man. Once he was a poet, now he is prosaic. His verbal courtship effort has decreased.

I have already argued that effective verbal courtship is a reliable fitness indicator precisely because it is costly and difficult. Animals evolve to allocate their energies efficiently. If it took a million words to establish a sexual relationship with you, your boyfriend was apparently willing to absorb those costs, just as his male ancestors were. But if it takes only twenty words a day to maintain exclusive sexual access to you, why should he bother uttering more? His motivational system has evolved to deploy his courtship effort where it makes a difference to his reproductive success— mainly by focusing it where it improves his rate of sexual intercourse. Men apparently did not evolve from male ancestors who squandered high levels of verbal courtship effort on already-

established relationships. Of course, if an established partner suspends sexual relations, or threatens to have an affair, evolution would favor motivations that produce a temporary resurgence of verbal courtship until the danger has passed. Frustratingly, a woman may find that the greater the sexual commitment she displays the less her man speaks.

This analysis may sound heartlessly unromantic, but evolution is heartlessly unromantic. It is stingy with courtship effort, stacking it heavily where it does the most good, and sprinkling it very lightly elsewhere. Human courtship, like courtship in other animals, has a typical time-course. Courtship effort is low when first assessing a sexual prospect, increases rapidly if the prospect reciprocates one's interest, peaks when the prospect is deciding whether to copulate, and declines once a long-term relationship is established. We all enjoy a desired partner besieging us with ardent, witty, energetic courtship. That enjoyment is the subjective manifestation of the mate preferences that shaped human language in the first place. As with any evolved preference, we may desire more than we can realistically get. Evolution's job is to motivate us, not to satisfy us.