The Meme Machine (25 page)

But is this the whole story? What exactly is it about men that women find attractive? According to evolutionary psychology, the genes determining female mate choice should be those that would have been selected for in a hunting and gathering life. In that way of life there are few possessions because people are always on the move, but providing regular supplies of meat and useful tools would presumably help in providing for children. Status might be earned by prowess at hunting, or fighting or protecting the group from enemies, or perhaps by impressive clothing or decoration. Can the genes for choosing these qualities in a man really lead us nowadays to choose men with big bank balances, fast cars, high–profile jobs, and beautiful houses? Possibly, although as we shall see, memetics takes a different view.

Another important biological fact is that a woman can be certain that her baby is her own, and may have a good idea of who the father is. Men cannot (or could not until the advent of genetic fingerprinting). This difference is especially acute in humans because women, rarely among
primates, have concealed ovulation – neither they nor their partners know at what times of the month they are fertile. A man cannot guard a woman all the time; so she may be able to trick him into caring for another man’s child. Indeed, this may account for the evolution of concealed ovulation (R. R. Baker 1996).

There are many ways for a man to increase the probability that he is the father of the child he is feeding or protecting. Marriage is one, and it is reinforced by men insisting on premarital chastity and marital monogamy. Some of human beings’ nastiest practices (at least from the female point of view) may also serve to increase paternal certainty, such as the mutilation of female genitals, chastity belts, punishment of women (but not men) for adultery, and various methods of locking women away from the world. I suppose I fell foul of the same unfairness in a minor way in the early 1970s. During my first term at Oxford I was unfortunate enough to get caught with a man in my room at eight in the morning. The man concerned was fined two shillings and sixpence (about twelve pence in today’s money, and not much even then) and told to be more careful by his ‘moral tutor’. My parents were summoned to college and I was sent away from the University for the rest of the term.

If parental certainty is so important, jealousy should serve different functions in men and women. The evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson argued that if what men fear most is being cuckolded they should be especially jealous of their partner’s sexual infidelity, whereas if what women fear most is desertion they should be most jealous of their partners spending time and money on a rival. Many studies show that this is exactly so (Wright 1994). David Buss even wired people up with electrodes and asked them to imagine their partners having sex with someone else or forming a deep emotional attachment to someone else. For men it was the sex that caused all the physiological signs of distress; for women it was the emotional infidelity (Buss 1994).

Finally, there is a last wicked twist to the argument. Women certainly want to get as much male investment as possible, but they may not be able to find both good genes and a good provider in the same man. Indeed, a man with good genes – tall, strong, and intelligent, for example – may find it so easy to get sex that he need not bother with putting effort into child care. This is apparently true in zebra finches and swallows where the more attractive males have been shown to work less hard in bringing up the young, leaving the females to work harder. On the ‘best of both worlds’ theory a woman’s best bet may be to capture a nice, though unattractive man, who will rear her children, and then go and get better
genes from elsewhere. As Matt Ridley (1993, p. 216) puts it ‘marry a nice guy but have an affair with your boss’.

We can probably all think of examples, but can such behaviour be biologically effective in modern humans? Evidence that it can comes from controversial research by British biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis (1994; Baker 1996). In a survey of nearly four thousand British women they found that women who were having extramarital affairs tended to have sex with their lovers more often when they were ovulating – and this was not true for sex with their husbands. In addition, they had more sperm–retaining orgasms (i.e. orgasms between one minute before and forty–five minutes after the man’s) with their lovers than with their husbands. In other words, if they were not using contraception they might still be more likely to get pregnant by the lover even though they had sex with him less often.

These are just some of the ways in which modern sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are coming to understand human sexual behaviour and mate choice. Some of the details may prove to be wrong and new theories will come along, but there is no doubt how effective this approach has been. However, there are many things about human sexual life that just do not seem explicable this way and will not, I suggest, succumb to a sociobiological account.

Memes and mates

There are two main ways in which memetic theory differs from a purely sociobiological account of sex. First, memes have been around for at least 2.5 million years; coevolving with genes and influencing sexual behaviour and mate choice. Second, memes are now well off the leash and during the last century sexual memes have influenced our lives in ways that have little or nothing to do with genes.

Let us begin with mate choice. The main difference between the two theories is this. According to sociobiology our choice of mates, and whom we find attractive, should ultimately come back to the question of genetic advantage. Our modern life may complicate things, but essentially we should choose to mate with people who would, in the environment of our evolutionary past, have helped to increase our genetic legacy.

According to (my version of) memetics, mate choice is influenced not only by genetic advantage but also by memetic advantage. One of my key assumptions has been that, once memes arose in our far past, natural selection would have begun to favour people who chose to mate with the
best imitators or the best users and spreaders of memes. This was part of my argument for the memetic driving of genes for bigger brains and language, but it also leads naturally to some conclusions about mate choice. As memetic competition took off in our far past, so the direction the memes took would have affected mate choice. People would have tended to mate with the best meme–spreaders, but what constituted the best meme–spreaders depended on what the memes were doing at the time. It is in this sense that the memes began to call the shots.

Let us consider some examples. In an early hunter–gatherer society a man who was especially good at imitation would have been able to copy the latest hunting skills or stone tool technology and hence would have gained a biological advantage. And a woman who mated with him would be more likely to have children who shared that imitation ability and that advantage. So how would she choose the right man? I suggest she would have to look for signs, not just of having the good tools because they might change, but of being a good imitator in general. This is the critical point – in a world with memes, signs of being a good imitator change as fast as the memes change. Genes for choosing men who could make and use the old stone tools might once have had an advantage but as more memes arose and spread they would not. Instead, genes for choosing men with the general ability to imitate, or even to innovate, would fare better. In a hunter–gatherer society such signs might include making the best tools, singing the best songs, wearing the most stylish clothes or body paint, or appearing to have magical or healing powers. The direction which memetic evolution took would have influenced the genes.

If this argument is right we would expect the legacy of memetic driving to be visible in our mate choice today – that is, we will still mate with the best imitators (and to some extent the best imitators of the kinds of memes that have been around in our past). In a modern city, clothes fashions might still be one sign, but others would include musical preferences, religious and political views, and educational qualifications. More important, though, would be the general ability to spread memes -to be the fashion setter as well as the best follower. This suggests that desirable mates should be those whose lives allow them to spread the most memes, such as writers, artists, journalists, broadcasters, film stars, and musicians.

There is no doubt that some of these occupations give you a good chance of being mobbed by admirers and of having sex with almost whomever you like. Jimi Hendrix apparently fathered numerous children in four countries before he died at the age of twenty–seven. H. G. Wells, although notoriously ugly and with a squeaky voice, reputedly specialised
in seducing several women in one night. Charlie Chaplin was short and far from good looking but a great sexual success story – as, apparently, were Balzac, Rubens, Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci. The biologist Geoffrey Miller argues that artistic ability and creativity have been sexually selected as a display to attract women (Miller 1998; Mestel 1995), but he does not explain why sexual selection should have picked on these features. Memetics provides a reason – that creativity and artistic output are ways of copying, using and spreading memes, and hence are signs of being a good imitator. I would predict that if these things could be teased out, women would, other things being equal, prefer a good meme–spreader to just a rich man.

Note that I have couched this argument in terms of female mate choice. There is some sense to this because, as previously discussed, females need to be more choosy over mates than males do, and, in general, sexual selection is driven by female choice – as in the examples of peacocks’ tails and other fancy plumage. However, this imbalance is not necessary for the argument I am pursuing here, and we may find that men too have tended to mate with women who are good imitators. Also, in today’s technologically advanced societies, women can spread memes as well as men can. So we may expect many more changes in sexual behaviour and mate choice as women increasingly take control over the spread of memes.

My suggestion that we should mate with the best imitators is central to the theory of meme–gene coevolution and memetic driving; so it is an obvious one for testing. The predictions are quite straightforward: that people should choose mates according to how good they are at copying, using, and spreading memes. Experiments might be designed to hold genetic factors constant, and manipulate memetic factors, while measuring perceived attractiveness. More subtly, we might explore the interactions. I would expect that an ugly and impoverished man might still be perceived as attractive if he were a great meme–spreader – but just how much ugliness could one get away with? Even in today’s meme–rich society, women very rarely choose men who are shorter than they are. Obviously, there is a limit to how far memes can overthrow genetic considerations, and this provides a fascinating area for research.

Memes are now spreading farther and faster than ever before and this has powerful effects on everything in our lives, including sex. The second way in which memetic theory differs from sociobiology is in the way it accounts for sex in the modern world. It is time to return to those sexy magazines and the quandaries of celibacy, adoption, and birth control.

CHAPTER 11

Sex in the modern world

It is time to come into the twentieth century. I have spent much of this book explaining how memes came about in human evolution and how they might have pressed the genes into producing a creature with an exceptionally big brain and the capacity for language. For most of this long evolutionary time our hominid ancestors had few memes to play with. They lived in relatively simple societies and there was little communication between distant groups. Things are not like that now. Not only are there far more memes in circulation, but the way they are passed on has changed.

Many memes are passed from parent to child. Parents teach their children many of the rules of their own society; how to hold chopsticks or a knife and fork, what to wear on which occasion, how to say please, thank you, no thank you, and countless other useful things. Children get their first language from their parents and usually their religion too. Cavalli–Sforza and Feldman (1981) call this vertical transmission, as opposed to horizontal transmission (between peers), or oblique transmission (e.g. from uncle to niece or older to younger cousin). The mode of transmission is important because it affects the relationship between memes and genes.

When memes are transmitted vertically they are transmitted alongside the genes. In general, this means that what benefits one also benefits the other. So, for example, if a mother teaches her child how to find food, how to avoid danger, how to dress up to look attractive, and so on, then she is not only helping her child survive but also helping the propagation of her own genes and her own memes. Indeed, if all transmission is vertical there can be little conflict between memes and genes (and no need for memetics). The sociobiologist’s leash is very tight indeed and all the memes that are created should be expected to be, at least in principle, helping the genes. In fact, they may deviate from this ideal in all sorts of ways, and fail to track the genes perfectly, but the principle is clear. When you pass on your ideas to your child it is in your own genetic interest to pass on ideas that benefit that child’s reproductive success. And from the meme’s point of view, its survival also depends on your reproductive success.

This suggests that coevolution and memetic driving cannot occur with only vertical transmission of memes. So we should note at this point that all the examples I have given of memetic driving involve at least some element of horizontal transmission. I suggested, for example, that people imitate the best imitators. This entails horizontal or oblique transmission, as does the creation of language, since you cannot easily have a language community in which people speak only to their parents and children.