The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [168]
Miller adduces some circumstantial evidence for his view. Surveys consistently place intelligence, sense of humour, creativity and interesting personality above even such things as wealth and beauty in lists of desirable characteristics in both sexes.52 Yet these are characteristics that fail entirely to predict youth, status, fertility or parental ability, so evolutionists tend to ignore them, but there they are, right at the top of the list. Just as a peacock’s tail is no guide to his ability as a father but despotic fashion punishes those who cease to respect it, so Miller suggests that men and women dare not step off the tread mill of selecting the wittiest, most creative and articulate person available with whom to mate (note that conventional ‘intelligence’ as measured by examinations is not what he is talking about).
Likewise, the manner in which sexual selection capriciously seizes upon pre-existing perceptual biases fits with the fact that apes are by nature ‘curious, playful, easily bored and appreciative of stimulation’. Miller suggests that to keep a husband around for long enough to help in raising children, women would have needed to be as varied and creative in their behaviour as possible, which he calls the Scheherazade effect after the Arabian story teller who entranced the Sultan with one thousand and one tales so that he did not abandon her (and execute her) for another courtesan. The same would have applied to males who wanted to attract females, which Miller calls the Dionysus effect after the Greek god of dance, music, intoxication and seduction. He might also have called it the Mick Jagger effect; he admitted to me one day that he could not understand what made strutting, middle-aged rock stars so attractive to women. In this respect, Don Symons noted that tribal chiefs are both gifted orators and highly polygamous men.53
Miller notes that the bigger the brain became, the more necessary long-term pair bonds were. A human infant is born helpless and premature. If it were as advanced at birth as an ape it would be twenty-one months in the womb.54 But the human pelvis is simply incapable of bearing a child with a head that big, so it is born at nine months and treated like a helpless, external foetus for the next year, not even beginning to walk until it is at the age when it would expect to enter the world. This helplessness further enhances the pressure on women to keep men around to help feed them when encumbered with a child – the Scheherazade effect.
Miller finds that the most commonly voiced objection to the Scheherazade effect is that most people are not witty and creative, but dull and predictable. True enough, but compared to what? Our standards for what is considered entertaining have, if Miller is right, evolved as fast as our wit. ‘I think male readers may find it hard to imagine some four-foot-tall, half-hairy, flat-chested, hominid females being sexier than similar hominids,’ wrote Miller in a letter to me (referring to Lucy). ‘We’re spoiled because sexual selection has already driven us so far that it’s hard to appreciate how any point we’ve passed could have been considered an improvement. We are positively turned off by traits that half a million years ago would have been considered