The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [146]
Until recently, sexual selection was an argument of last resort, when appeals to natural selection by the ‘environment’ had failed. But why should it be? Why is it more plausible to suggest that blonde hair in Baltic people was selected by vitamin D deficiency than to suggest that it was selected by sexual preferences? The evidence is beginning to accumulate that humanity is a highly sexually selected species and that this explains the great variations between races in hairiness, nose length, hair length, hair curliness, beards, eye colour – variations that plainly have little to do with climate or any other physical factor. In the common pheasant, every one of forty-six isolated wild populations in central Asia has a different combination of male plumage ornaments: white collars, green heads, blue rumps, orange breasts. Likewise, in mankind, sexual selection is at work.22
The male obsession with youth is characteristically human. There is no other animal yet studied that shares this obsession quite so strongly. Male chimpanzees find middle-aged females almost as attractive as young ones, so long as they are in season. This is obviously because the human habits of lifelong marriage and long, slow periods of child-rearing are also unique. If a man is to devote his life to a wife, he must know that she has a long potential reproductive life ahead of her. If he were to form occasional short-lived pair bonds throughout his life it would not matter how young his mates were. We are, in other words, descended from men who chose young women as mates and so left more sons and daughters in the world than other men.23
The Legs That Launched a Thousand Ships
That many of the components of female beauty are clues to age, every woman and every cosmetic company well knows. But there is more to beauty than youth. The reasons that many youthful women are not beautiful are generally twofold: they are overweight or underweight, or their facial features do not fit our image of beauty. Beauty is a trinity of youth, figure and face.
A pop song from the 1970s included the cruelly sexist line ‘nice legs, shame about the face’. The importance of regular, symmetrical facial features is somewhat puzzling. Why should a man throw away a chance at mating with a young and fertile woman simply because her nose is too long or her chin double?
It is possible that facial features are a clue to genetic or nurtured quality, or to character and personality. Facial symmetry may well prove to be a clue to good genes or good health during development.24 ‘The face is the most information-dense part of the body,’ as Don Symons put it to me one day. And the less symmetrical a face is, the less attractive. But asymmetry is not a common reason for ugliness; many people have perfectly symmetrical faces and yet are still ugly. The other noticeable feature of facial beauty is that the average face is more beautiful than any extreme. In 1883 Francis Galton discovered that merging the photographs of several women’s faces produced a composite that is usually judged to be better looking than any of the individual faces that went into making it.25 The experiment has been repeated more recently with computer-merged photographs of female undergraduates: the more faces go into the image, the more beautiful the woman appears.26 Indeed, the faces of models are eminently forgettable. Despite seeing them on the covers of magazines every day, we learn to recognize few individuals. The faces of politicians, not known for their beauty, are much more memorable. Faces that are ‘full of character’ are almost by definition non-average faces. The more average and unblemished the face, the more beautiful, but the less it tells you about its owner’s character.
This attraction to the average – to a nose that is neither too long, nor too short,