Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival - Matt Ridley - #923

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What was Darwin's strangest idea?

**Matthew White Ridley** (0:04)
Sexual selection by mate choice is the idea that Darwin had alongside natural selection and which he maintained was a very different process. Almost nobody agreed with him in his lifetime. It was a failure in the sense that he couldn't persuade people that this was an important thing. And when people did agree with him, they thought, well, yeah, but it's just a small niche thing in the corner of biology. And I don't think that's right. I think he was on to something that actually when mates are selective, which they are in many species, it drives a huge amount of evolution in the other sex, and it's a very different process from natural selection. I call it the fun version of evolution because it produces songs and things like that. It's less utilitarian.

**Chris Williamson** (0:48)
Yeah. What was the reaction when Darwin first proposed sexual selection?

**Matthew White Ridley** (0:55)
Well, he mentioned the idea in The Origin of Species very briefly, and he said, I think that he had a friend called Sir John Seabright, who had been breeding rather beautiful bantam, new varieties of bantams. And he said, if a man can produce a beautiful bantam in a short time, then why can't a female produce a beautiful male in over a thousand generations? And he was ridiculed for it. And by the time of the fourth edition of The Origin of Species, he felt it necessary to put in a sentence saying, yeah, look, they are beautiful, these male birds, to us. But that doesn't mean they were put on earth to please us. They could have been put on earth to please females. And this made things worse because everyone else said, I'm sorry, are you suggesting that female birds are capable of aesthetic discrimination? Give me a break. And Wallace, in particular, deserted him on this topic. So did Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, all his normal defenders were not prepared to defend this idea. Partly, these crusty old Victorians were a bit uncomfortable with the idea of women having sexual agency at all, of course, let alone lust.
So, you know, one has to take into account that. And but I then I'm very fond of a person who features in my book called Edmund Seleuze, who was an amateur naturalist who watched the same species as me, the black grouse, as well as a number of other species. And he said, you know, Darwin was right. The evidence speaks trumpet-tongued in his favor, which is such a nice phrase, I think, because it's clear when you watch some of these birds that the females are being very selective and are in charge of whether or not mating happens.

**Chris Williamson** (2:50)
Yeah, I can imagine that Victorian England wasn't superbly keen on the idea of flipping the gender hierarchy upside down and saying, well, maybe the males were shaped by female preferences. And that also sort of has in it a sense of almost sort of promiscuity in a way, a degree of female sexual agency, which again, Victorian England probably not superbly popular.

**Matthew White Ridley** (3:18)
Yeah, and we don't need to be all that smug about Victorian because we too tend to say, well, hang on, isn't female beauty to males more important than male beauty to females in our species? And it might well be the case. I mean, that's true in some bird species, but actually in our species, both sexes are highly selective when they choose long-term partners. And so there's going to be different criteria, but similarly choosy, similar choosiness in both sexes. But yeah, now people find it instinctively odd that women should be choosing, that females should be choosing males on the basis of appearance.

**Chris Williamson** (3:59)
What is the fundamental mystery when it comes to sexual selection?

**Matthew White Ridley** (4:04)
The fundamental mystery is why so many species indulge in growing and displaying features that hinder their own survival, take a lot of energy, and can be amazingly flamboyant. If you look at some of the birds of paradise that do a sort of shape-shifting display where they disappear into a sort of black hole and projector, iridescent smiley face on it.
What on earth is going on? It's such an eccentric outcome to come from evolutionary biology, that it still doesn't... Where's the rhyme or reason is another way of putting it. And actually, I see evolutionary biologists' arguments over the last 150 years as being a series of last-ditch attempts to put rhyme or reason back into this process. And there might not be rhyme or reason. It might be just be extravagant for your own sake, because females are going to go for the most extravagant thing you can do. And I'll explain why I think that works as a technique.