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Next time you visit a zoo in the spring try to watch a male Lady Amherst Pheasant from China posturing before a hen. He is a riot of colour. His face has a patch of pale blue skin. On his head is a scarlet crest. Around his neck is a white ruff trimmed with black. His throat is iridescent green, his back emerald green and royal blue, his belly pristine white and his rump orange. At the base of his tail are five pairs of vermilion feathers. His tail itself is longer than his body, white barred with black. A dull or damaged feather would stand out a mile. He is one great advertisement for good genes, handicapped by the need to keep clean, healthy and out of danger, a walking illustration of his mate’s sensory biases.

The Human Peacock

The antics of peacocks and guppies are interesting enough in themselves to naturalists; to students of evolution, they are intriguing as test cases; but to the rest of us what makes them worth studying is pure self-centredness. We want to know what lessons they teach us about human affairs. Are some men successful with women because their appearance sends an honest signal of their handicapping good genes and their ability to resist disease?

The idea is ridiculous. Men succeed with women for much more varied and subtle reasons: they are kind, or clever, or witty, or rich, or good looking, or just available. Mankind is simply not a lekking species. Men do not gather in groups to display at passing women. Most men do not abandon women immediately after copulation. Men are not equipped with gorgeous ornaments or stereotyped courtship rituals, however it may look in the average discotheque. When a woman chooses a man to mate with, she is less concerned with whether he can father sexy sons or disease-resistant daughters than whether he would make a good husband. A man choosing a wife uses equally mundane considerations, though he is perhaps more of a sucker for beauty. Both genders use criteria that bear on parental abilities. They are more like terns choosing mates that can fish well than sage grouse hens copying each other’s choice of a fast-displaying male. So the Red Queen race between the genders over seduction and sales-resistance that follows from pure Good-gene choice does not happen.

And yet, we cannot be so categorical. There are species of mammal in which the effects of sexual selection are few and small. It is hard to argue that the average rat has been endowed with conspicuous display ornaments by the preferences of ancestral females. Even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are little touched by the effects of female choice: males look much like females and courtship is somewhat simple. But we should pause before dismissing the effects of sexual selection on human beings. People, after all, are universally interested in beauty. Lipstick, jewellery, eye-shadow, perfume, hair dyes, high heels – people are just as willing to exaggerate or lie about their sexually alluring traits as any peacock or bowerbird. And as the list above makes clear, it seems as if men seek female beauty rather more than women seek male beauty. Mankind, in other words, may be the victim of generations of male choice, even more than female choice. If we are to apply sexual selection theory to man, it is male choice for female genes that we should examine. But it makes little difference. When one gender is being choosy, all the consequences of sexual selection theory inevitably flow. It is quite possible, even likely, as the next few chapters will reveal, that some parts of the human body and psyche have been sexually selected.

CHAPTER SIX

Polygamy and the Nature of Men

‘If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.’

Aristotle Onassis

‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’

Henry Kissinger

In the ancient empire of the Inca, sex was a heavily regulated industry. The sun-king Atahualpa kept one thousand five hundred women in each of many ‘houses of virgins’ throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and rarely chosen after the age of