SOME kinds of design are impossible to overlook. Wings are designed for
flight, eyes for sight. A little research reveals that certain molecules in HIV
are designed to penetrate our cells, and the narwhal’s tusk is designed for the
mating market. Evolutionary psychology (AKA evil psychology) follows the same
idea into the human mind, and Nancy Etcoff’s enjoyable, though imperfectly
convincing book, The Survival of the Prettiest, is a
popular evolutionary psychological study of sex appeal. Her aim is clear: “We
will look at the argument for beauty as a biological adaptation.”

Strictly speaking, it is the sense of beauty, not the beauty itself, that is
the biological adaptation. By way of analogy, we may find some kinds of
landscape more beautiful than others, but that does not mean the landscape
evolved to please us. Likewise, the indicators of youth and health that Etcoff
discusses are, in her account, not evolved signals, as is the peacock’s tail,
but the unmodified normal condition of someone who is young and healthy.
(Although for all I know, to a self-conscious peahen—if you can imagine
such a bird—that startling male tail might appear unmodified, just normal
for young and healthy peacocks.) She quotes Donald Symons: “Beauty lies in the
adaptations of the beholder.”

At some level, evolutionary psychology is surely correct. We prefer mates of
an appropriate age, sex and species, and natural selection presumably tuned our
preferences to this end. (Human sexuality is, of course, magnificently variable.
“Mate preference” here refers only to a majority preference.) Controversially,
evolutionary psychologists have concentrated on particular facial and bodily
features that may indicate youth or health.

Take symmetry, which may be associated with health: we prefer the look of
more symmetrical bodies and faces. The waist-to-hip ratio of women has a low
value of about 0.7 soon after puberty, and men like the look of women with this
figure, regardless of their total weight. Etcoff has difficulty explaining the
modern cult of thinness, or “the slim ideal”. As she says, “selection should
work against such a preference”, because emaciated women have low fertility. She
is unsure what is going on, but suggests that it is a fashion, driven by women,
rather than a Darwinian adaptation in the eyes of men. Evolutionary psychology,
too, throws in the towel with Kate Moss. But she does point out that Twiggy in
her modelling heyday reached a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.73, even though she
weighed just 42 kilos.

Shave it

Etcoff’s book is mainly about beauty in women, but she devotes a chapter to
men. Height and a V-shaped torso matter for beauty, but she concludes, after
appropriate study, that penis length does not. She does have a good story about
facial hair, though.

In 1907, a Parisian scientist asked two men, one with and one without a
moustache, to go on a walk around Paris. The next stage of the experiment
consisted of two women “whose lips had been sterilised”, positioned in the
Louvre. The men, at the end of the walk, were required to kiss the women (one
each).

“The residue was wiped off and dipped in a sterile solution and left standing
for four days. The residue from the clean-shaven man contained merely harmless
yeast, but the residue from the moustached man was `swarming with malignant
microbes . . . diphtheria, putrefactive germs, minute bits of food, a hair from
a spider’s leg and other odds and ends’. Beards never quite recovered.”

And I had supposed that shaving was another piece of youth—mimicry.

Free will rules

Beauty is a politically sensitive subject. It has been argued that standards
of beauty are arbitrary and imposed by patriarchal media to subjugate women.
Etcoff performs a successful demolition job on this theory.

She is less successful, I think, when she comes to the flexibility of
biological adaptations. “Evolutionary psychologists would suggest that instincts
that have worked for millennia will be very hard to stamp out,” she says. They
would do better not to make this suggestion. The expression of genes is well
known to depend on the environment, and the fact that something is an adaptation
tells us nothing about how the genes that code for it will respond to a new
environment. Bacteria switch genes for sugar digestion on and off depending on
the sugars in the environment. In us, the gene that causes the disease
phenylketone ureaia is effectively switched off if the person carrying it eats a
diet without phenylalanine. Genes in our brains switch on and off depending on
the environment. I do not know what (presumably complex) set of genes code for
our sense of beauty, but I strongly guess they interact with our environment: it
would be odd, from general considerations of genetics, if they did not. We are
no more victims of our genes than of pictures in the media.

Etcoff writes pleasantly and is often witty, so The Survival of the
Prettiest is easy to read. Critics might call it shallow, but I suspect the
light touch of Etcoff’s prose reflects her skill as an author rather than any
paucity of her science. This would make a great beach read for the summer,
where—out of scientific curiosity, not lust or envy—you can test
your own aesthetic reactions to the height and symmetry, skin tone and hair
texture, V-torsos and waist-to-hip ratios of the bodies that are lying
about.

Trivers noticed that any individual child is genetically 100 per cent
related to itself but only 50 per cent related to its brothers and sisters. A
parent, however, is equally 50 per cent related to all its children. The
result is an amazing evolutionary conflict between two sets of genes within
the same body. Genes that influence parental behaviour are expressed in adults
but silent in children; natural selection on them favours approximately equal
division of resources among children. Other genes in the same DNA molecule
influence child behaviour, being expressed in children and silent in adults.
And natural selection on them favours an unequal division of the same
resources among the same children.

Children cannot physically force their parents to do things, and Trivers
suggested they will instead use psychological tactics. “Regression”, for
example, is behaviour in which children act younger than they really are, and
Trivers interpreted it as an attempt to elicit the more attentive parental
behaviour appropriate to a younger child. Weaning conflict also makes sense in
the Triversian view, and David Haig has recently extended the idea to the
physiology of human pregnancy.

PsychoDarwinism is a popular book. It aims to show how Trivers’s (and other
people’s) evolutionary ideas provide a new supporting basis for Freud’s
psychology. As such, it invites three questions. Is the science itself OK? How
convincing is that science as a support for Freud? And how well does the book
work as popular science?

The evolutionary theory itself is, I think, mainly fine. Trivers’s idea has
gone from strength to strength since it was proposed in 1974 (although, it
should be said, mainly in such specialist byways as the sex ratio of ants
rather than child development). Badcock is also streets ahead of most
nonbiological writers on the topic because he actually understands the theory.
There is no naive group selection here, nor any rubbish about determinism, or
the dangers of metaphor, or the impossibility of single genes that cause
behaviour. To have mastered both psychoanalysis and neoDarwinism is a genuine
achievement.

The book is unashamedly speculative, and loose in its argumentative style.
It is more a book to stimulate than to convince, and few readers will follow
Badcock all the way. I had suspended belief by the time we came to anal
retentiveness (a device, Badcock would have it, by which children deceive
their parents into thinking they are underfed). The stuff about castration
anxiety, I also suspect, lacks theoretical support.

I am less joyful about Badcock’s treatment of Freud. For my taste, there is
too much about what Freud actually meant; I found most of these parts both
distracting and unconvincing. I am not a Freud scholar and do not intend to
become one, but I can tell when I am being fed a lawyer’s rather than a
scholar’s argument. The quotations look selective.

For example, Freud is widely believed to have argued that we are inclined
to incest, but cultural taboos stop us from indulging ourselves. Badcock
quotes a 1924 paper in which Freud considers, as a possibility, that we might
lose interest in incest in much the same way that our “milk teeth fall out”,
rather than by cultural repression. Badcock triumphantly concludes that “the
preceding quotation refutes absolutely those who 
 [and so on, and so on]”.
But it doesn’t really. The quoted passage itself reads like an incidental,
noncommittal thought bubble. Even if it is more than that, the volume of
Freud’s writings would make it unpersuasive: I suspect some other quote could
be dug out to “support absolutely” the usual view of Freud.

As a work of popularisation, it is of variable quality. It is readable and
light-going, and the ideas are consistently interesting. On the other hand, it
suffers from occasional lapses into professional allusion or infighting, and
it has a few serious misrepresentations. One concerns the nature/nurture
controversy. Badcock tells us that his Freudian psychoDarwinism offers the
“best of both” of the standard “two rival approaches”: “biological
determinism” (which ignores the environment) and “cultural determinism” (which
ignores biological factors). I do not know anyone who believes in this simple-
minded biological determinism, and the wonderful insight Badcock credits to
Freud is in some form or other a standard part of almost every relevant
science, from molecular developmental genetics to symbolic anthropology.

Badcock’s is not the only way of applying evolutionary theory to Freud.
Anthropologists place more emphasis on cultural variation, and explain some of
Freud’s findings by the evolutionary peculiarity of Western rearing practices.
Nor is it the only way to apply evolutionary theory to psychology. However,
PsychoDarwinism is a worthwhile popular introduction to one theme in the
emerging science of evolutionary psychology.

‘Evolution is not antireligious any more than the roundness of the earth
is antireligious,’ according to the American palaeontologist George Gaylord
Simpson. But whether he is right, I suspect, depends on the religion. In
so far as religion depends on the idea that species were created supernaturally,
fixed in form, evolution is antireligious; in so far as it does not, it
isn’t. While biologists may think that creationism should not be included
in a religious creed, it is not their job to tell people what to put in
their religions: they should leave that to the ayatollahs.

Many of the authors included in Evolution Extended would disagree. The
book is an anthology about evolution and religion. It contains the work
of scientific atheists, creation scientists and religious evolutionists.
‘Separatists’, however, who would allow both religion and science but keep
them in their proper places, have short shrift. One who is represented is
Pope John Paul II, and Barlow pontifically excerpts him beneath the well-chosen
title ‘good fences make good neighbours’. Another is Karl Popper, whose
remark that ‘it is important to realise that science does not make assertions
about man’s task in the world’ was (at least to me) welcome after reading
Julian Huxley’s efforts to establish himself as a global evolutionary ayatollah.

The main dialogues concern, as well as creationism, various more or
less religious improvements on neo-Darwinism. I detected three such attempts
in particular, two linked by the idea of progress. Julian Huxley and Teilhard
de Chardin both suggest that humans are evolution’s highest achievement
so far, and that progress in the future will be made by building on us.
Their arguments are gasp-makingly feeble. Consider: if there are 30 million
species alive today, then there are 30 million evolutionary lineages leading
from the common ancestor of life to a modern species. If you trace the events
up some of them, there is change as far as the origin of bacteria, and then
constancy; up others, there are other patterns of change. Only if you arbitrarily
pick one of them – the one leading to humans – out of the 30 million do
you see the events so marvelled at by the philosophers of evolutionary
progress: net change in an anthropomorphic direction. For Huxley this was
‘independence from the environment’, for de Cardin ‘cerebralisation’.

Progressionists are mesmerised by this one lineage, or small number
of lineages, and they cannot stop thinking of it as the evolutionary highroad,
even while insisting that they are not being anthropomorphic. But if they
had picked some other lineage they would have a different story to tell.
There is as much evolution (about 3.5 billion years of it) behind a modern
bacterium, with its ‘cerebralisation’, as there is behind us, with ours;
it just happens to be a rather different evolution.

Barlow says she selected some of de Chardin’s more readable passages
(and I believe her), but there is plenty of vintage material. For example,
‘half of our present uneasiness would be turned to happiness if we could
once make up our minds to accept the facts and place the essence and the
measure of our modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis,’ wrote de Chardin.
I expect you are half cheerful already.

The third problem with neo-Darwinism is that natural selection is not,
well, very nice. Some writers want more emphasis on cooperation, and find
symbiosis particularly significant. Peter Corning has it that symbiosis
‘clearly defies the ‘tooth and claw’ model of natural selection.’ I should
have thought it exemplified it rather well, but neither he nor the other
authors actually explains how the process (selective death, competition
and so on) leading to the evolution of symbiosis is any more edifying than
evolution to, say, a flesh-destroying Streptococcus.

Barlow’s selection is broad-ranging and well-balanced. De Chardin is
bound together with Peter Medawar and Jacques Monod, Huxley with Simpson
and William Provine. She has interspersed the scientific writings with pictures
and poetry. As with all the best anthologies, if you dip into it you often
find something surprising. The number of writers is large: there are also
long (5 to 10 page) extracts from Francisco Ayala, Gregory Bateson, John
Tyler Bonner, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Alister Hardy, and E. O.
Wilson, and extracts from many others. Francis Crick, for instance, has
a paragraph on the (mainly negative) reaction to Monod’s Chance and Necessity.
The reaction, says Crick, ‘is all the more surprising since the central
vision of life that it projected is shared by the great majority of working
scientists of any distinction. It would be difficult to find a better example
to display the deep rift between science and the rest of our culture.’ Such
is the rift that Barlow, in this and her anth-ology From Gaia to Selfish
Genes, is working to put bridges over. Good luck to her.

Mark Ridley is assistant professor in the departments of anthropology
and biology, Emory University, Georgia, US.

Consider ‘the Demon, Jealousy’ who ‘with Gorgon frown pursues the steps
of unsuspecting love’. Matt Ridley’s book ranges over many topics in the
evolution of human sexuality, but let us look at what he has to say about
that green-eyed monster. It can both illustrate many of the Red Queen’s
general attributes, and also should enable you to decide whether it is your
kind of book.

Jealousy, we learn, is a ‘human universal’ which is ‘deep-seated in
men’. Ridley worked for The Economist for several years and has a good line
in blunt summaries: ‘In short (he says), in every age and in every place,
men behave as if they owned their wives’ vaginas.’

Jealousy here illustrates a general theme in the book. Ridley maintains
that there is a characteristic ‘human nature’: that all humans have a typical
human mind (with such attributes as jealousy, though its degree depends
on sex). It may be so, but he does not bother much with the evidence. I
guess it would have been anthropological research that revealed the universality
of jealousy, but all we are told is that its universality was discovered
‘despite the best efforts of anthropologists to find a society with no
jealousy and so prove that it is an emotion introduced by pernicious social
pressure’. Anthropologists and other social scientists do not come out well
in The Red Queen.

And why did we evolve jealousy? Natural selection would have eliminated
people, particularly men, in the past, who did not experience the emotion.
‘Cuckoldry is an asymmetrical fate. A woman loses no genetic investment
if her husband is unfaithful, but a man risks unwittingly raising a bastard.’
The genetic asymmetry leads Ridley on to peer beneath the judicial skirts.
For adultery, there are notorious legal double standards, and this ‘is
a prime example of the sexism of society, and is usually dismissed as no
more than that’. That explanation, however, does not satisfy Ridley. The
law is not sexist about other crimes, such as theft. Adultery sticks out
as a peculiar case, and its peculiarity makes evolutionary sense. He also
likes to use the evolutionary ideas to play around with received morality,
and discusses how ‘love is an admired emotion, whereas jealousy is not an
admired one, when they are plainly two sides of the same coin’. This is
all politically charged stuff, and Ridley’s arguments (as he is well aware,
and almost pleased about) will not please PC persons as much as they will
PI persons.

The section on jealousy is just one in a wide-ranging book. The Red
Queen starts with the question of why sex exists, moves through sex differences,
and ends with a chapter on the human brain, suggesting it evolved by sexual
selection. Ridley favours the parasitic theory of sex (though his case against
Alex Kondrashov’s mutational alternative is unconvincing), and the related
idea that mate choice has much to do with finding healthy and disease-free
partners. The general principle is that humans, in most if not all societies,
past and present, evolved to behave in such a way as to maximise the number
of offspring they leave. He also considers analogous work on many non-human
species, particularly birds. Birds often make better human models than primates,
because they form monogamous pairs rather like ours.

What about the human brain? Ridley suggests it evolved because men and
women preferred more intelligent members of the opposite sex, whether because
they were wittier or more cunning. Sexual selection has produced so many
of the bizarre and exaggerated characters – peacock’s tails and so on –
in the animal kingdom, that it is a theory of choice when you are confronted
by anything that seems rather overdone.

But I am sceptical. Sexual selection, particularly for exaggerated characters,
works best as a theory of sex differences. It is only the peacocks, not
the peahens, who have the ridiculous tails. Sexual selection can work the
same way on both sexes in monogamous species; but then it usually produces
sensible things, rather than brains that are three or four times too big.
I therefore suspect sexual selection is not the right place to look for
a theory of the human brain; the organ is too similar in men and women.
But this chapter contains much good material for all that.

I read the book as an anthropologist, an evolutionary biologist – and
as an M. Ridley. It is only as an anthropologist that I have any reservations.
When anthropologists appear at all, it is too often only to be dispatched
because they ‘exaggerate racial differences’ or promote ‘pure nonsense’;
but this was usually only a minor distraction. As an evolutionary biologist,
I agree with most of Ridley’s conclusions and enjoy the way he argues to
them. I am only unsure how important they are within the science as a whole.
Great new scientific ideas have a certain feel to them, as you sense that
they open up large areas for further, and increasingly exact, research.
But the ideas here look as if they may simply burn themselves out without
developing into a full science. They may be powder trails without a bomb.
We shall see.

Finally, I must speak as an M. Ridley. The author kindly remarks in
his preface that he has benefited from being mistaken for me: and I, too,
thrive on the same mistake. One colleague has already been astonished how
I have managed to write another book, and I shall be delighted to be widely
credited with its authorship. The Red Queen is astonishingly up to date
and wonderfully well written. It has a professional writer’s readability
without a journalist’s vices – such as plugging new ideas into tired old
cliches or inventing bogus controversies. It is an excellent addition to
our joint CV.

Mark Ridley’s most recent book is Evolution (Blackwell Scientific).
He is an assistant professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Biology,
Emory University, Atlanta.

WE CAN enjoy gardens full of flowers that are white and smelly because
of the demanding aesthetics of moths. Moths fly by night and have no use
for fancy colours: flowers that would be pollinated by moths attract them
instead by floral fragrances. These evocative dusk and night-time smells
(white flowers are, at best, weakly scented by day) are attractive to humans
too, and are known to the parfumier. As Deni Bown says, cruelly inverting
the direction of imitation for our urban and cosmetic times: ‘Moth-pollinated
flowers smell like scented soap.’

The moths’ sense of smell seems to have a peculiar aesthetic convergence
with our own. This is not shared by the consistently bad taste of dipteran
flies, which like their flowers to smell of rotting flesh or worse, nor
with the erratic taste of bees, which do like many sweetly fragrant flowers,
such as clover and pansies, but are also attracted to the disgusting Helleborus
foetidus, known as stinking hellebore or bear’s foot. The butterflies, however,
are less concerned with scent.

The other possible convergence is with the fruit-eating bats of the
tropics. The principle here is the same. They fly by night and are attracted
by scent to the plants they pollinate. Fruit bats, of course, like the smell
of fruit, and many bat-pollinated flowers satisfy them. There are no fruit-eating
bats in Britain, but we do have imported exotic flowers, such as the Mexican
cup-and-saucer vine Cobaea scandens, which has a white variety, beautifully
photographed in this book by the author. It gives out the smell of fermentation.

Our aesthetic convergence with moths extends also, in a way, to the
sense of sight. White flowers are increasingly being discovered by interior,
and exterior, designers. It is for these people, rather than botanists,
that Deni Bown produced her book. The book is at its best in the author’s
superb colour photographs. It begins with a beautiful Lilium longifolium,
which, we are told, is a current favourite with the advertisers, as it can
sell anything from Wedgwood china to washing machines. There is also the
splendid Spanish broom, Viola cornuta with drops of mist, white tulips,
delicately shaped bogbean and many more. She illustrates moth-pollinated
flowers, such as tobacco plants and Nottingham catchfly, delightfully too.

The text, alas, does not achieve the same high standards as the pictures.
It lacks a theme, or leading idea; it is more of a magpie’s nest, telling
us about white flowers in everything from municipal heraldry to Lady Diana
Spencer’s wedding bouquet. There is, however, a useful list of white flowers
for the garden and conservatory; both of which seem almost all-inclusive,
though I missed the powerful Rhododendron odorissimum, which fills a boathouse
in the Cambridge Botanic Gardens with an unbelievable scent in the early
summer. I confess to the nasty thought that the author compiled the list
by the scissors-and-paste technique from earlier horticultural guides. She
also includes advice on gardening advice, which should be gratefully received
by beginners in the principles behind the famous white garden at Sissinghurst
Castle, Vita Sackville-West’s home in Sussex.

Deni Bown retells, if rather artlessly, many historical and mythological
stories about white flowers. The main trouble is she assumes too little
background knowledge of her readers. I fear that anyone who has not heard
of Narcissus, or needs to be told that the Renaissance was ‘a flowering
of European civilisation that began in Italy around the fourteenth century’
does not read books at all.

The anecdotes are numerous enough for something to be new to almost
any reader; and the stories can be quite curious. While the botanical explorer
Ernest Henry Wilson was travelling in China to plunder the gorgeous Lilium
regale of that region, he went in a sedan chair, as a status symbol. The
gods resented his hubris. In the mountains of Tibet his chair was struck
by an avalanche and sent careering down the slopes. Wilson dived out in
time, but only to be hit in the right leg by another boulder. He did return
to Europe, with his booty of 7000 bulbs, but Wilson was now permanently
lamed: he called it his ‘lily limp’.