by Scott Hoge
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The problem with costly fitness indicators such as peacock tails, however, is that they introduce danger for the species in their very attempt to provide a means for escaping it. One may question whether the need for selection was ever really there to begin with, or whether we can do away with such indicators altogether. As awful as it may sound, some have even suggested that human illnesses like schizophrenia result from the impairments caused by these indicators in humans (Shaner et al., Schizophrenia Research, Volume 70, Issue 1, 2003).
The appearance and organization of the human body, as well as the abilities, traits, dispositions, likes and dislikes with which it is endowed, are based in large part on its gene-sequence. Genes are like instructions for the building and maintenance of the human body. They contribute in telling us what to look like, how to grow, and how to act. A great deal of our personality is based on our genetic code. There are over 20,000 genes in the human genome, allowing for billions upon billions of possible human beings.
At birth, we inherit half our genes from our mothers and half from our fathers. This explains why we look like our parents and tend to preserve the same characteristics over time. In the cycle of reproduction, new genes can appear through various processes, such as exposure to chemicals or ultraviolet radiation, in many cases changing the appearance and personality of the gene-holder. This observed fact forms the basis of the theory of evolution presented by Charles Darwin, according to which not just humans but all cellular organisms live, reproduce, and evolve within the constraints imposed upon them, by their environment and by each other. These constraints, which can be dangerous, resulting in death for some, can influence the direction of evolution and determine in part what traits we come to have. This is why we have arms, legs, hands, feet, and life-sustaining organs. This is why we don't walk into tar pits, why our skin is darker in hotter countries, and why we are quick to protect our own and others' lives. We are simply what is left after nature took away those of us who could not survive. This instantly has a designing effect on us. You can imagine life as a driving force on our planet, doing what it feels appropriate, while nature plays the role of a sculptor, shaping life and enhancing it.
It does not follow from this line of reasoning that every trait we have come to have evolved by natural selection. The trait of being a bully, for instance, can spring up out of nowhere and propagate itself, spreading like wildfire just because it can. The destructiveness of some of these traits can pose new environmental dangers that would further alter the course of evolution, or even wipe us out altogether. For this and other reasons, I feel that we must be careful before using Darwinism as a justification for acts of antipathy and cruelty.
Evolution is a process that takes place whether or not we were created as written in the Book of Genesis. It does not even imply that we evolved from monkeys. It is just a result of genetic recombination and the arising of beneficial genes that enhance our prospects for survival. It has been observed in the laboratory with animals like fruit flies that reproduce rapidly, and it has been observed in humans.
Sexual Selection and the Notion of Physical Attractiveness
The notion of attractiveness is found everywhere in our culture. We talk about what's 'sexy' and what's not, who is beautiful and who is ugly, and what we like to see in each sex. As I will show, the idea of an 'ugly person' is really only a metaphor, an attention-grabber, at best a mere opinion, and while there are such things as scales of fitness called indices, there is no such thing as a truly 'ugly' person. Any line drawn between the attractive and the unattractive is arbitrary.
The significance and prevalence of this notion of attractiveness is explained by a Darwinian theory called sexual selection. According to this theory, attractive features are interpreted as indicators of fitness and 'good genes' that would combine with ours to produce healthy offspring. If we mate with the unattractive, our offspring are more likely to become sick or meet untimely ends. As a result, we have evolved not to mate with them as often. The advantage of this, sexual selection states, is that it allows us to avoid death in the same way our nature-hardened genes encourage us not to walk into tar pits.
If this makes you angry, then you are not alone, as I have wrestled with this law of nature in my 25 years without a girlfriend. And as we shall see, there are actually many fallacies running rampant about what sexual selection amounts to, what causes it, who is 'inferior,' and what we should do about it. There are eugenicists who believe that we should forbid certain people from having children. The Nazis in World War II exterminated millions as part of their eugenics program. Also, there are people who simply perpetuate false notions about what ought to be considered ugly.
What Makes People Attractive?
The idea of attractiveness is embodied in fitness indicators. These are signals, some of them involving aspects of the human body, that we find sexually desirable, because they tell us, "I'm healthy. I will help your children survive." There is no obvious method to rate a person's fitness in a totally meaningful way, so nature has come to approximate fitness with 'good guesses': height, frame structure, muscle mass, body symmetry and facial features. Also included are human activities like dancing, ball sports, displays of generosity, and ordinary smalltalk.
There are three types of fitness indicators that I will discuss: indices, costly indicators, and subjective signals.
Indices of fitness
Indices of fitness are scales on which we can be ranked from lowest to highest that nature determines as good guesses of fitness. Examples of indices are height, muscle mass, and various hormone levels. They become indices of fitness when we evolve to notice them as signals of health.
Unfortunately, a common pitfall in our culture today is the assumption that everyone can be ranked on one giant scale, and that for any two people, either one or the other can be determined to be more attractive. This may perhaps be more tempting in a capitalist society such as ours, where everyone has a certain amount of money. In truth, we must acknowledge that there are multiple indices of fitness, and you can be higher on one but lower on another. Who, then, is more fit? Technically, you can't decide.
Simply rating everyone's looks by indices of fitness would also leave out the more subjective aspects of attractiveness, which I will discuss below.
Costly fitness indicators
Costly fitness indicators differ from mere indices in that they consume resources an animal could have otherwise used for its own survival, thereby trading some of its actual fitness for sexual advertisement, as in a peacock tail. Peacocks have long been heralded as examples of this phenomenon in the animal kingdom. While the tail of a peacock creates survival difficulties -- by impairing running speed, for instance -- it makes up for them by increasing the peacock's likelihood of reproducing (see figure). To be reliable indicators of fitness, they must also be hard to fake.
Subjective signals of fitness
Sometimes we determine that someone is right for us by reference to more than just their indexical standing. This is due in part to the fact that certain gene-sequences go well together. When we look for others who have things in common with us, we are engaging in assortative mating, and when we look for others whose traits differ from ours, we call it disassortative mating.
One may even give a name to the pairing of more attractive partners with each other and of less attractive partners with each other: assortative index-based mating. It has the advantage that children born to to fit parents get the best from both their mothers and fathers, but also the disadvantage that people who are forced to 'lower their standards' are more likely to have sick or disabled children.
Such a mating scheme in which the more attractive simply forbid themselves to the less attractive is in danger of creating a lot of pain, hostility, and resentment from the less attractive, who may feel trapped in despair as victims of culture. In response to this danger, one might envision another mating scheme called disassortative index-based mating, in which the more attractive pair with the less attractive to ease the pain. Children born in such families would at least be less likely to become ill than if they were born to parents who were both less attractive.
Is Physical Strength an Indicator of Fitness?
The phrase 'survival of the fittest' is thrown around a lot, but I really believe that this is an oversimplifcation of Darwin's theory. The 'survival of the ones who aren't killed' is a bit more accurate. One important question about the nature of fitness is: Are stronger men objectively more valuable than weaker men? Many have answered, 'Yes,' but in truth, the answer might be, 'No.'
Our present culture seems to be swayed by the popularity of ball sports into believing that bigger, stronger men who are 'winners' of such sports are objectively more fit than smaller, weaker men, whose 'losing' circumstances in such encounters are to be stigmatized and avoided by both the strong and men in general. Not only is this prejudice a great annoyance to smaller men who find themselves shunned by the opposite sex, but it also results from a grave fallacy based on the ruleset of traditional sports -- in particular, on the rule that teams must contain equal numbers of players. This rule creates a 'pigeonhole' philosophy of sport in which individual strength is largely sought in addition to team strength, favoring the strong individual over the weak individual. In contrast, if you had a greater number of players on one team consisting of mostly weak players (revising the game mechanics to compensate, we might imagine), the weaker players could still be winners. Not only that, but there are evolutionary advantages to being small in addition to being large, and one of them is that it allows a greater number of people to coexist on the same planet. I have written more about this in my essay, The Weaknesses of Competition for Individual Strength and the Evolutionary Value of Small Size.
There are some writers (perhaps Nietzsche is one of them) who believe that in a war between the individually strong and the individually weak, the individually strong must dominate. I answer that this, again, results from a fallacy in confusing the individual with the groups at hand. While it is true that the 90% strongest can defeat the 10% weakest, or even that the 50% strongest can defeat the 50% weakest, we must admit that the 90% weakest can team up on and defeat the 10% strongest when they feel it necessary (as some species of army ants show). It's all about psychology. To attempt to infer from traditional ball sports and oversimplified paraphrasings of Darwinism that stronger men are more fit than weaker men is both fallacious and disrespectful.
What Should We Do for the Romantically Rejected?
It is rather unfortunate that so many men and women are at present in the habit of ridiculing the romantically unsuccessful. As a 25-year-old virgin, I can tell you that the experience of being alone can be frightening and painful. The suffering of the minority of the rejected may be a far greater problem than we realize. To give you an idea of the severity of the problem, here are a few things I've had to deal with:
In light of the sheer intensity of my own suffering, what can be done to appease the romantically rejected? I believe that this is one of the greatest political questions that mankind can ask, and also one of the most difficult to answer. Standard ethical systems such as utilitarianism and duty-based ethics have weaknesses, and Christianity does not do too well in defining the concept of 'sin' or in proving the existence of the very reward it promises for such people.
Doctors attempt to find medicines and cures for diseases and we try to make technological improvements to accommodate the less fit, but at the same time, this increased safety and freedom allows even sicker people to be born into the world. For this reason, advancements in technology and medicine by themselves do not convincingly appear to solve the problem.
The Nazis attempted to solve it by exterminating people they found undesirable by quite painful means, including furnaces, gas chambers, and concentration camps. One may question whether all that pain was really necessary to eliminate pain from the world in accordance with a eugenics program. We may eventually find programs that are less painful than outright Nazism.
One idea is to legalize drug use and voluntary euthanasia for the less attractive minority. They would at least get to have fun for a little while, before they decided that they would rather leave the world. To prevent adaption against the pleasurable sensation of drug use from occurring, we may need to be selective in deciding who gets to use them, or find some other means of keeping the hidden pleasure of drugs 'secret' from our DNA.
Regardless of what solution we find, if we simply work to improve awareness, tolerance, understanding, and empathy on the issue of attractiveness, we may ease the harshness of sexual selection just by reassuring others that we care about their feelings.
Above all, I hope we can find a solution to this heartbreaking problem, one that would not make the human race appear to be a species of sadists, or happiness itself to be essentially grounded in torturing the less fortunate. If the romantically rejected turned out to be the ultimate victims of nature, it would truly be an insult and a disgrace.
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