This Idea Is Brilliant by John Brockman

Author:John Brockman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Sexual Selection

Rory Sutherland

Executive Creative Director and Vice Chairman, OgilvyOne, U.K.; columnist, The Spectator; author, The Wiki Man

Having been born in the tiny Welsh village of Llanbadoc 141 years after Alfred Russel Wallace, I’ve always had a sneaking affinity with people eager to give Wallace joint billing with Darwin for “The Best Idea Anyone Ever Had.”

Having said which, I don’t think evolution by natural selection was Darwin’s best or most valuable idea.

Earlier thinkers, from Lucretius to Patrick Matthew, grasped that there was something inevitably true in the idea of natural selection. Had neither Darwin nor Wallace existed, someone else would have come up with a similar theory; many practical people, whether pigeon fanciers or dog breeders, already understood the practical principles quite well.

But for its time, sexual selection was a truly extraordinary, out-of-the-box idea. It still is. Once you understand sexual selection—along with costly signaling, Fisherian runaway, proxies, heuristics, satisficing, and so forth—a whole host of behaviors that were previously baffling or seemingly irrational suddenly make perfect sense.

The body of ideas falling out of sexual-selection theory explain not only natural anomalies such as the peacock’s tail but also the extraordinary popularity of many seemingly insane human behaviors and tastes—from the existence of Veblen Goods, such as caviar, to more mundane absurdities, such as the typewriter. For almost a century during which few people knew how to type, the typewriter must have damaged business productivity to an astounding degree; it meant that every single business and government communication had to be written twice, once by the originator in longhand and then once again by the typist or typing pool. A series of simple amends could delay a letter or memo by a week. But the ownership and use of a typewriter was a necessary expense to signal that you were a serious business. Any provincial solicitor who persisted in writing letters by hand became a tailless peacock.

But take note: I have committed the same offense as everyone else writing about sexual selection. I have confined my examples of sexual selection to those occasions where it runs out of control and leads to costly inefficiencies. Typewriters, Ferraris, peacock’s tails. Elks will make an appearance any moment now, you expect. But this is unfair.

You may have noticed that there are very few famous Belgians. This is because when you are a famous Belgian (Magritte, Simenon, Brel), everyone assumes you’re French. In the same way, there are few commonly cited examples of successful sexual selection, because when sexual selection succeeds, people casually attribute the success to natural selection.

But the tension between sexual and natural selection—and the interplay between the two divergent forces—may be the really big story here. Many human innovations wouldn’t have got off the ground without the human status-signaling instinct. (For a good decade or so, cars were inferior to horses as a mode of transport—it was human neophilia and status-seeking car races, not the pursuit of “utility,” that gave birth to the Ford Motor Company.) So might it be the same in

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