The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [83]
Sexual selection theory sees urges to improve or enhance fitness by any available means as utterly natural strategies: they are straightforward Pleistocene adaptations. In this, sexual selection theory goes dead against many forms of cultural constructionism that have prevailed intellectual discourse for the last half century. For instance, it has years been widely argued that women dye their hair and apply wrinkle creams only through cultural pressure, and that wrinkles and gray hair natural.” A Darwinian view maintains that, on the contrary, a woman’s desire to look younger, like a man’s desire to appear stronger, taller, more wealthy, is adaptive and innate. Such strategies will take different forms in different cultures and epochs, but they are prehistoric in their origins. Contrary to gender theorists who have tried to argue that women’s of creams and dyes makes them dupes of the cosmetic industry, converse is more the case: industries that produce lipsticks, mascara, persist because they represent our deeper, innate nature.
The general rule is that skeptical sensitivity to detail and nuance about sexually selected signal is bound to arise if the signal is open to any degree of fakery. Whatever the limitations of their avian intellects, peahens unquestionably more severe and perceptive critics of peacock tails than human observer could hope to be; those tails are important to peahens ways they can never be to us. Similarly, human abilities to make critical distinctions in responding to evolved cues and signals are effortless and acute. Human critical discrimination in signals requires very little training get it going: it is spontaneous, often a component of gossip, and even pleasurable—always the mark of an evolved capacity. “That suit’s an Armani? I don’t believe it.” “I can’t tell if she dyes her hair, but it’s gorgeous.” “How can I take seriously a so-called professor who keeps saying ekcetera’?” “She shouldn’t try to get rid of those crow’s feet—they give her character.” “I wonder if that’s a real tan?” “Terrific! It makes you look twenty years younger!” “Did you notice his elevator shoes?” “It was a nice meal, but she made it out of packaged food.” “He actually only knows French phrases.” “Sure, she’s a doctor—of homeopathy.”
Human obsessions with what is fake and what is genuine in skill, eloquence, beauty, and intelligence merge into another fitness indicator that have already encountered high on the female list of mate-selection indicators and rather lower on the male list: wealth, along with its closely associated feature of social status. Women normally cannot help paying attention to how rich a man is—or how potentially rich, if he has not out on a career—as well as his conscientiousness, social standing, and generosity. As a fitness indicator, wealth is open to dishonest signaling, women are especially keen to distinguish honest wealth signals from faked or exaggerated ones. From the standpoint of sexual selection, whether that really is a Rolex watch or an authentic Princeton diploma trivial. Selective pressures in the Pleistocene seem to have combined with cultural expressions from the Holocene to put in place elaborate systems of resource-demonstration rules that are intuitively recognized by females—and ignored by males at their reproductive peril.
How does resource-demonstration work in courtship? Here is where spontaneous, universal characteristics of an adaptation make themselves Hence flowers: they