Matt Ridley
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
What was Darwin's strangest idea? 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, you know, he couldn't persuade people that this was an important thing.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
They've got ultraviolet vision, all sorts of things. So to some extent, we can sort of empathize with birds. But in terms of the study of sexual selection, birds really do stand out because there has been an explosion of dramatic shapes, crests, plumes, colors, displays, dances, and songs in the birds that dwarfs other species.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
So if you just take song, for example, I was out this morning when the sun came up and the bird song was fantastic. It's springtime. There was no mammal noise at all. Maybe I heard a sheep at some point. Maybe a dog barked in the distance, but that was it. You know, if we didn't have birds, think how silent it would be.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And song is quite a useful thing to study, actually, if you want to understand what's going on here. And so without birds, well, also, you know, birdwatching gets a lot of human beings into natural history and then into biological sciences. Me, I was a birdwatcher before I ever thought of being a scientist, and that's true of a lot of people.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Jim Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA, he was a birdwatcher as a teenager, and that's what got him interested in biology, et cetera. So I think... Now, you could say... Butterflies, dragonflies, lots of sexual ornamented colors. Fish, lots of bright colors. But they're not as easy to study. They're either too smaller or they're harder to observe or they're underwater or something.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Birds are the obvious ones to go for. Mammals? Mammals are brown. With very few exceptions. I mean, there's a black one and a gray one, and few monkeys have colorful faces. But apart from that, they're really grim to look at. And the noises they make are terrible, really. And also, they do a lot more sexual coercion than birds.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
There's another way in which we're similar to birds, and that is forming pair bonds to bring up offspring. Birds do a lot of that. Most birds, black grouse are an exception, peacocks are an exception, but most birds, male and female, collaborate to rear the young. And again, we empathize with that.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
In an awful lot of mammals, all the work is done by the mother, both gestating and lactating, obviously, and nurturing the offspring. So there's a sense in which we are honorary birds.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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. But I'm very fond of a person who features in my book called Edmund Salus, who was an amateur naturalist who watched the same species as me, the black grouse, as well as a number of other species.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Right. So why not just choose a strong male who will give you strong children? And the answer is that there's a seduction going on. It's a charm. It's a persuasion. It's not a coercion. That's the first point. The second point is, yes, but why let yourself be charmed by a flamboyant tale or bright colors or whatever? And the argument that Wallace...
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
raised and that has reverberated since through the topic is that it's a proxy for fitness of some kind. it's telling you if you can grow that peacock's tail and keep it in good nick and display it frequently, then you must be quite healthy. You must have good disease resistance genes or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And that's the kind of version of sexual selection we always hear from natural history programs and that is generally pursued by most biologists. And it's probably not wrong, But there's another thing going on that is, I think, usually more important, particularly when you get these exaggerated flamboyant plumages. And that is the idea that...
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Ronald Fisher first thought of in 1930 and was later mathematically proved by Russell Landy and Mark Kirkpatrick in 1980. And that is that the fitness the females are after may not be just whether their offspring survive, but whether their offspring seduce.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
The thing that really matters to them may be having offspring that can persuade members of the opposite sex to mate, particularly male offspring. And that it's no use choosing an ugly male partner that is particularly strong and disease-resistant so that you can have strong and disease-resistant sons.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
if those suns can't persuade other females to mate with them because they haven't got flamboyant tails.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
The sexy sun hypothesis. And that's a sort of runaway effect. Seduction of the hottest versus survival of the fittest is another way I put it. I didn't think of that until after I'd finished the book. What a shame.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Right. Well, the answer to that, I think the clue to it is And I can't prove this. And this is the problem with this version of sexual selection theory. It's very hard to devise experiments that prove it. I will mention one in a minute. But the answer, I think, is that the smallest bias in the females... in a random direction will get exaggerated.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And it doesn't really matter which direction it's in, it will run away and you can't stop it. And so the clue is the fact that you get such extraordinary diversity of sexually selected ornaments in birds and other animals. In other words, There is no pattern. There's no general practice that they tend to have eyes on their tails.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It's not always the tails. It's not always the wings. It's not always the crest. It's not always the breast. It's not always the back. It's not always red. It's not always yellow. Do you see what I mean? And once you start looking at the extraordinary diversity of tails, ways in which sexual selection has gone mad in the birds of paradise, in the pheasants, in the mannequins, in species like that.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
You know, why do puffins have red and blue stripes on their beak? You know, that's a sort of completely different way of doing things. There's a bird called the tragopan, which pops out from behind a log when he's trying to seduce a female, and lowers from his throat an electric blue apron with red patterns on it of skin. Why? So it's the very arbitrary nature of the
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
features that I think argues for this process. Now, you can still say, yeah, but why would it matter? And of course, probably what's going on is that to start with, being a bit brighter than another male does mean your immune system's in better order or you haven't been infected with malaria or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
So, at the end of the book, I say, hang on, we're constantly trying to choose between these two theories, fitness and hotness, if you like, and we shouldn't have to. They're obviously both going to end up assisting each other.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yes, but it might be worth mentioning that what I think is the best experiment I describe in my book, it doesn't feature birds, unfortunately. It features a small insect. And it was done by Andrew Boundford and one of his students on a sort of Brazilian fly. And what he did was he took the...
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
he allowed them to mate and in, in the laboratory, this is, and the, she actually, it was she who did the work and, uh, I'm trying to remember her name, but, but Andrew's student. And, um, he, he chose, he bred from the, uh, he, he took the unsuccessful males and put them on one side and the successful males. And he bred a lineage from one and he bred a lineage from the other.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
So he's now got the failures and the successes fathering the next generation. And he does that for several generations. And then he says, what's the difference between these flies at the end of several generations? Are they less able to survive because they've been bred from the failures? And the answer is no. Are they less able to persuade other flies to mate with them? Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
So that's quite a nice, that's the best experiment for teasing out these two hypotheses that I've come across.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yes. Although, if the runaway process is as accelerating as Fisher thought, then it might not be a million years. It might be one of these things that happens really very quickly in a few thousand years. And... Uh, you know, the peacock might've gone from having a short tail to having a huge tail in the sort of blink of an evolutionary eye.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And one of the ideas I toy with in the book is, can we, can we catch a species? In the moment when it suddenly starts having a runaway selection. And come back in a thousand years and see what's happened.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, this is why I went and sat for two nights running on top of a mountain in Norway and not allowed out of my little canvas blind from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., watching a bird that displays at midnight, through the middle of the night, called the great snipe. Of course, it's not dark in Norway at that time of the year. And the great snipe looks like any other snipe.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
There are 17 species of snipe on the planet, and they are all sort of really well camouflaged in marsh vegetation, including this one. It doesn't look much different. But this one does this lecking. Males gather together and competitively display. And at the height of its display, it flushes the white feathers in its tail. And it's like turning on a light.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It's a very bright little flash, very brief. But the tail feathers are not very exaggerated, and they're not much whiter in the male than the female, a little bit. And if you typex some of the male's tails so they're –
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
young people don't know what Tippex is, but if you put white paint on some of the male's tails, you can improve their mating success, according to some Scandinavian biologists who are very ingenious.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Exactly. Exactly. But my point is, Male snipe and female snipe look almost identical. In fact, you can't really tell the difference. And the tail is a bit different, but you can't see it very well most of the time. So maybe this is a species that's only just started. having highly skewed sexual mating success so that one male gets to mate with 10 females, which is roughly what happens.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And it hasn't had time for the tale to get huge and white and dramatic, and that might be about to happen. The conventional explanation for The Great Snipe is that it's – Because it's often displaying in very poor light, there's no point in being brightly colored. And a lot of the display involves making clicking noises and maybe it's an auditory lek rather than a visual lek.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
But other birds make noises of the lek too. So I kind of like my idea best that this is a species that's only just begun to lek. And there's another bird called the buff-breasted sandpiper, which sort of leks, but sort of doesn't. And I'd like to watch that species for a thousand years and see what happens. What's the lek paradox?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
The leg paradox is that the black grouse, which leg, live next door to the red grouse, which don't. They pair up. So one male, one female, and they both bring up the kids. Therefore, because the one male gets to mate with 10 to 20 females in the black grouse,
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
but the other 19 or 9 or 19 males on his leg don't get to mate at all that year, the bird will have less genetic diversity in its population than the red grouse. It will... be more genetically monotonous. It will be more inbred. Not to the stage where it's a sort of health problem because the males usually only get one year at the top and the females disperse.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And so, you know, the species is fine in that sense. But it must be the case that there is less genetic diversity in a lecking species like the black grouse than a monogamous species like the red grouse. In which case, there's less point in being choosy because the genes are going to be more similar.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I mean, when you go on to a lek, you're bound to be looking at some half-brothers because they tend to recruit to a lek near where they were born. And if they were born in the same year, then the chances are they had the same father, even though they might have had different mothers.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And so if they're half brothers and they look the same – and by the way, they do look very similar to us – then what's the point of being so choosy? The species that are most choosy about, you know, making sure you get the very, very best male and not settling for second best – which the red grouse do all the time. They say, look, I just want a bloke who's going to look after the kids.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I don't care what he looks like. I'm anthropomorphizing, but you get the point. The species that are most choosy have least reason to be choosy. That is the Leck paradox. And I think the Fisher theory shows you a way out of it. It doesn't matter how little variation there is. You've still got to follow the fashion. But not really. I mean, I'm struggling with it too.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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 onto 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.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
So it is a paradox, and it's an intriguing one. This episode is brought to you by Whoop.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
different criteria, but similar choosiness in both sexes. But yeah, people find it instinctively odd that women should be choosing, that females should be choosing males on the basis of appearance.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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. You know, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ,,,,,,, They can, but we can't. And they're both brightly colored. So there's a bird called the crested auklet, which is a cousin of the puffin, which lives in the Pacific Ocean. And there was a very neat experiment done on that in the 1990s where
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
You know, it's 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...
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
They said they grow just a tiny little black sort of forward-pointing crest on the top of the head, and their beak gets much redder in the breeding season. So they took some birds, caught some birds, and they lengthened the top knot on the head or shortened it and then measured how long it took for that bird to acquire a mate.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And by lengthening the top knot, you shorten the time that the bird takes to acquire a mate. The bird is more attractive. And that was true for both sexes. So that's rather intriguing. That proved what we had suspected for a long time, that you can get mutual sexual selection. You can get choosiness in both sexes in some species for the same criterion.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And then there's a bird in New Zealand called the paradise shell duck, where the male and female are both smart, but they look very different. The male has a black head and a gray patterned body and white wings. The female has an orange body and a white head. They're both striking birds, but they look quite different.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Now, clearly, the females are saying, I want the male with the blackest head, and the males are saying, I want the female with the whitest head. Well, does that ring a bell? Do human beings have mutual sexual selection? Yes, we're both very choosy when we pick long-term partners. But we don't have the same criteria, do we?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
You know, male beauty and female beauty are different things, both on the outside of the body and possibly on the inside of the brain.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
a series of last last ditch attempts to put rhyme or reason back into this process and there might not be rhyme or reason it might 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 yeah i i can imagine i can see especially in a
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yeah, my book isn't about one bird.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
ugly african ape um but inevitably you know one feels obliged to put a chapter in at the end about this and i'm absolutely sure that sexual selection is going on in our species i'm also pretty sure it's mutual and not uh not like the black grass in the in the in which you know it's female selectivity that's driving male appearance and i think in our both sexes are very selective we're a monogamous
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
she's at least socially monogamous. That doesn't mean we're necessarily faithful and we can be much less choosy when it comes to short-term sexual encounters. But for long-term pair bonds, both sexes are pretty damn choosy about who they settle down with. That, after all, is the plot of every romantic comedy ever made. So what's going on in human beings? What are we selecting for?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, clearly there are sexually selected features of bodies like breasts or beards or something that may be involved in beauty. But I think it's more interesting to look at the inside of the head because the human brain did something very odd. It exploded in size over a relatively short period of about a million, two million years. Maybe three, I don't know, but not a very long period.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It accelerated. The increase in brain size was very steady until around Homo erectus it suddenly takes off. And actually it's got slightly smaller again in the last 50,000 years, we think. It reached its maximum size about 50,000 years ago on average. And that might be something to do with agriculture enabling us to live on more meager diets or something like that. But it was very costly.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I mean, the human brain is a huge user of energy. It takes a lot of energy to build it. It takes a lot of energy to run it. Why? What's the purpose of growing such a big brain? No other species needed it to survive on the savannah. And if you say, right, well, it helped us get through the ice age on the savannah when The climate was very variable.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, plenty of other species managed to survive on the savannah, you know, buffaloes and gazelles and baboons and chimpanzees in similar habitats and so on. They didn't need 1,200 cc brains. So maybe it wasn't all about survival. Maybe it was about something else. Now, there's two other possibilities.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
One is that it was a social thing, that we needed big brains to understand the groups of people we were living in. We lived in big groups. We were plotting and scheming. deceiving each other. So we needed big brains to figure out what other people were up to and that kind of thing. And that's a very popular thing called the social brain hypothesis.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And that's obviously, to some extent, true as well. But there's a third possibility, which almost never gets discussed. but which was laid out in a very good book by Jeffrey Miller 25 years ago called The Mating Mind, in which he says, actually, this looks awfully like a sexually selected feature. It's a mental peacock's tail.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
The sudden takeoff, the fact that it didn't happen to other species, and the fact that the things we use it for are not just solving practical problems or understanding how to get on with each other in society.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
We also use it very conspicuously for things like wit and humor, music and song, verbal dexterity, poetry, all these kinds of things, tool making as well, practical things as well, some of which looks awfully like showing off
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
to members of the opposite sex so maybe and and you know it's it's it's not at all difficult to see that people with great minds are attractive to members of the opposite sex in human beings um people you know with the verbal dexterity of george clooney or the um singing ability of Mick Jagger. You know, these guys don't do badly in the attractiveness stakes.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I've chosen male examples, but I genuinely want to keep stressing that I think in our species it's going both ways. Humor is a very good example. If you ask people, Helen Fisher did this, um, how important is humor to you in choosing a sexual partner? Um, it scores very highly. And, you know, the personal columns, the, um, where people advertise for, uh, well, I guess they don't do it anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
They do it on, on site online, but you know, good sense of humor. G S O H is, is a very important part of it. And what, what's the point of who humor otherwise, you know, and watch what people do with humor. They show off with it. You know, they're, they're not doing it to find out information from other people. They're doing it to impress other people.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Uh, and that looks awfully like sexual display. Um, so, uh, Miller says, and I think he's right, that this isn't a slam dunk, this isn't a proven idea, but to spend the whole of the 20th century thinking about Freud and Marx and Piaget and
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
you know, all the other sort of theories of mind, behaviorism, and all these things, without taking into account that the organ we're doing all this behavior with was probably subject to sexual selection and was probably being used to seduce as well as to survive. To do all that without taking that into account is a mistake.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And we might have left an enormous hole within a lot of our social science, within psychology and sociology and economics and all these other disciplines, the hole being sex. And we need to put it back in there.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yes. And the person who solved that problem was a brilliant evolutionary psychologist called Robert Trivers, who said something that's blindingly obvious, but none of us had thought of it before. And he said it in the early 70s. He said, the species where the The sex that invests most in rearing the offspring will be competed for by the sex that invests least. So it's called parental investment.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
But it's a vicious circle because, as I say, the red grouse, they both invest a lot in looking after their kids. Right. The black grouse, they don't. The female does it all. So the black grouse, you get a huge amount of male-male competition to try to mate with females and a lot of sexual selection, less in the red grouse. But which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Right. And the bird that Wallace and Darwin ended up arguing about most in 1868, when their dispute over this came to a head, was a bird called the Argus pheasant, which is a sort of peacock-sized bird in the jungles of Southeast Asia, newly discovered at the time, which has enormous wings, very, very long wing feathers. And these wing feathers have a series of
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Did the parental investment come first or the sexual selection come first? And the sort of exception that proves the rule here is – those species of birds where it's reversed, where, uh, the brightly colored forward and aggressive females compete for dull colored males because the males sit on the eggs. Um, And I studied one of these species. It's called the gray phalarope.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
It lives in the Arctic. Phalaropes, chicanas, dotterels, there's a number of species that do this. It's not very common, but it's not all that rare either. And the female is much more conspicuous, much more boldly colored, spends much more time displaying, and much more inclined to fight with other females. So that kind of proves Trivers' parental investment theory right.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Now, in human beings, you can say that Women do more of the work, and of course they do. They do gestation and lactation, which men can't contribute to at all. But compared with gorillas or chimpanzees, males do contribute an awful lot more parenting than most other great apes. And we are... we have less sexual dimorphism than most other great apes.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I mean, a male gorilla weighs twice as much, if not more, three times as much as a female gorilla. And he has a harem of six or seven females. In chimpanzees, they have a multi-male system where each female mates with lots of males, partly to frustrate the tendency of males to commit infanticide, which they do in a lot of mammals to bring
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
females back into fertility probably in human beings to look at the number of stepchildren that get killed compared with um uh biological children the the um uh murder rate is much higher the cinderella effect as it's known the cinderella effect exactly um so um
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
You know, it's unfortunate that there's only four great apes, orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and us, plus the gibbons are similar species, because if there were 30 or 40 species of apes… then we could really do some good comparative analysis and see how we ended up with the mating system that we did.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
But I would argue that the need for fathers to be involved in provisioning and protecting offspring as well as mothers has been a feature of hunter-gatherer life for a very long time. And it has... made us into a species in which females are going to be pretty choosy about males as well as males being pretty choosy about females.
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
objects depicted on them that are clearly intended to be three-dimensional optical illusions. In other words, they look like little spheres because they've got highlights at the top and shading at the bottom. So somebody's gone to great trouble to make these things look as if they're actually three-dimensional. You know, they're sticking out of the feather like a sort of pebble or a jewel. And
Modern Wisdom
#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, it's hard not to watch some of these bird displays. and not draw parallels with nightclubs and other things. You know, there's a strutting that both species do, I suppose. Um, uh, but I think that's mostly anthropomorphism. Uh, we, we, you know, we human beings, um,
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, I think song is actually the most intriguing one because there's no other mammal that is as interested in singing as we are, with the possible exception of gibbons and maybe howler monkeys. But, you know, song and language are very unique and remarkable human beings. features and they feature heavily in seduction and display that's true of many birds as well
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
and the complexity of song in birds is is truly extraordinary the number of different phrases and different motifs oh sorry i've left out whales haven't i whales really sing as much as we do so that they're they're another um uh example um but uh i think you know we When you try and teach a chimpanzee to speak, it's really tough. And you can get up to a few hundred words. You can't get grammar.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
You can't get syntax, really, to speak of. Same for a gorilla. When you try and teach a parrot to speak, and this has been done. There was a famous African parrot called Alex who had an enormous vocabulary. and really seem to understand grammar in a way that most other animals can't. The word order or whatever matters in terms of what it means.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I call it the fun version of evolution because it produces loud songs and things like that. It's less utilitarian.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
In that sense, there are similarities between us and birds.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
There's a rather good quote from Darwin on this, which I'm rather fond of, which is, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting, of course, man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have. And, you know, he's really flirting with a dangerous...
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
idea there um that you know there's something uncannily similar about us and birds here because there's no reason why you know it's convergent evolution if if we and birds have this similar taste for the beautiful and one of the things that i've been thinking about is It's unlikely to have been inherited from a common ancestor, this taste for the beautiful.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Because our common ancestor with birds, we now know, lived about 400 million years ago. That's an awfully long time ago. And we know what that common ancestor looked like, roughly. It was a lumbering reptile that lived in a swamp. It gave rise to both the dinosaurs, which gave rise to the birds, and to the so-called mammal-like reptiles, which gave rise to the mammals.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
So we're not close cousins descended from a creature that had a sense of the beautiful, probably. Maybe we are, but it doesn't seem likely. It seems more likely that we have ended up with an appreciation of color and tune and song and melody and fashion and all these kind of things, and so have quite a lot of bird species. And it just so happens that those have ended up with similar outcomes.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
genuinely darwin's critics including a guy called wood who was doing the uh doing the pictures actually for his book said look i'm sorry for to for this to be created by females female birds, you've then got to posit that females have an aesthetic sense.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Now, why might that be? Well, notice that on the whole, sexual selection goes for pure colors, not browns. and grays. So it goes for limited number of wavelengths, limited number of frequencies, pure hues. If you've got every hue you can think of, then you end up looking brown.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
um and it's the same with song if you if if if you just want to make a noise uh a click or a roar or something it's got every sort of frequency in it but if you go for just specific frequencies you get a whistle or a or a tone or a or a tune um and that's of course much harder to do i mean you can make a boring noise by dropping a rock or you can
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
paint something brown just by mixing lots of materials together but to actually create something that has a pure color or a pure sound is much more improbable much more unlikely much more conspicuous much rarer and that's why we find it That's why we use it in our sexual displays, and that's why birds use it in their sexual displays.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And so there's a sort of almost a thermodynamic idea at the root of this. But as you can see, I'm beginning to wave my hands a bit, and I haven't thought this one through properly.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, for me, the history of science always teaches the importance of humility. Overconfident rejection of maverick ideas is the constant theme of all science. But that doesn't mean that every maverick who comes along waving a new theory is Galileo. quite a lot of the time he's not or she's not. And for me, that's the big puzzle of my life is how do I know
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
when to listen to a maverick and when to tell them to get lost. Because there are many, many scientific debates where you just want to say, oh, for God's sake, get real. That idea can't be right. And 95% of the time, you're right to have that attitude. But 5% of the time, you're being like Catholics and being dogmatic and telling a perfectly sensible chap to get lost when you shouldn't.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
But the idea that a bird with a brain the size of a walnut is capable of appreciating and enjoying three-dimensional optical illusions is for the birds. I mean, he didn't use that phrase, but that was the implication of what he said. So there's real...
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And this was true of Darwin generally, isn't it? He was a maverick and a heretic and he had to work really hard to get taken seriously. And evolution was rejected and still is by many people. And it's true of his sexual selection idea where he was rejected as a nutcase. in his lifetime and for quite a long time afterwards, and wrongly so. But, you know, since then,
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Lots of people have put forward fresh ideas about why birds are colorful. For example, to go back to this, there was a theory in the 1980s that it was all about warning predators that you were in good health and therefore there was no point in chasing you. Well, I don't really see why a kingfisher needs to do that more than a sparrow. But, you know, maybe there's an idea there. And in general...
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
I'm more frustrated by science being too dogmatic than being too open to new ideas. Yes, if you're too open to new ideas, if you open your mind too much, your brain falls out, as someone once put it. But I would like... generally to teach the lesson that we need to be more tolerant of disagreement, of heresy, of mavericks, and give them at least the privilege of testing their ideas. That said,
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And you often get told by people, I've got this new theory. And the line I always come back with was, how are you going to test it? And that often shuts people up. So it's lazy to come up with an idea. It takes work to test it. Awesome.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Well, I have a website which I mostly keep up to date. It's called mattridley.co.uk. I am just about to get on Substack, I think, too. I can churn my stuff out there. And I'm on... Twitter, I'm not very active on Facebook and LinkedIn, but I try and be. And I write books and journalism as well. And the book is called, I should say, Birds, Sex and Beauty. What's the subtitle?
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
The Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Matt, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on and allowing me to wrap it on at such length.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
You know, people like Sir Joshua Reynolds have been writing books about aesthetics at this stage and saying, you need to have been to Oxford to really understand aesthetics. But sorry, can I go back to one thing you said which intrigues me? And that's the idea of intelligent design. Because in some ways... Darwin is flirting with something that looks a bit more like intelligent design here.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And it's been pointed out by Eveline Richards and others, who's a historian of this period, that his interest in natural selection almost seems to dry up after The Origin of Species. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about it. His next books are about things like the domestication of animals. Well, that's not natural selection. That's artificial selection.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And then sexual selection, which again is females driving the selective process. And Wallace, his friend and rival, reacts against this in exactly the way that you might, where he sort of says, look, I'm now more Catholic than the Pope. I really believe in this bottom-up natural selection, survival of the fittest thing.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And I think bird beauty is just for some reason something that helps the species survive or the individual survive. And it's a part of natural selection. And I don't like the way Darwin is flirting with conscious beings, which female birds are, choosing what males should look like. Now, Darwin isn't going that far.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
He's not literally saying that females are sitting down and planning what they want peacocks to look like. But there's a little bit of... He's prepared to accept that evolution can be directed. In a way that looks a little dangerous to people like Wallace.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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'd 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.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
That's a lovely way of putting it. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. And there's a plaintive quotation from him at one of his last meetings at the Linnaean Society before he died, where he says, I still think I'm right. I know all you guys tell me I'm wrong.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Yeah, that's all true. I mean, he is a cautious, conservative establishment figure. He's wealthy and mixes in upper-middle-class circles, and he's not a boat rocker in the sense... I mean, Wallace is a socialist and a feminist and all sorts of... and a man of humble background and things like that. So in that sense... Darwin is an unlikely revolutionary.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
But in another sense, I don't think you're right to say that the self-doubt held him back. Once he'd committed to writing The Origin of Species, which took a big leap and took 20 years of angst, as you say, before he did. Once he did, he very rarely...
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
gave an inch well no that's not true he compromised actually the later editions of the origin of species are much less convincing than the early ones because he is trying to compromise with his critics and he's obviously you know feeling the pain of of some of the criticisms um But he then plows on finding all these stories about animals and plants and details that can buttress his ideas.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
There's no sense in which he wants a quiet life. Well, he does. He doesn't want to get involved in the controversies himself, but he wants to keep pushing the ideas out there. So he's a magnificent person. But Robert Wright was the one who pointed out
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
and I'd never thought this before until I read Robert's point on it, that the way in which Wallace's letter from Papua New Guinea or from New Guinea was handled was quite cunning on Darwin's part. And they're quite selfish, actually. We tend to think of him as being magnificently generous and saying, look, this chap has scooped me.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
But why don't we both present our ideas at the Linnaean Society together? Yeah, but when it came to it, Wallace was off in New Guinea, didn't know this was going on. They didn't have time to tell him anything. Lyle says, look, look, you poor chap, Darwin, don't get too head-tumped about it. We'll have a meeting and we'll present your paper first and then Wallace's and you'll get the credit.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And so in a sense, Wallace does get shafted by this person. And Darwin, for all his politeness… He's got a ruthless streak in him. He's got a ruthless streak and he wants his priority on this topic. But back to sexual selection.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
um wallace wins the argument in their lifetimes um and uh his and continues to really many ways up till today actually the versions of wallace's theory are still pretty popular we can come back to the details of that if you like um uh and and and some of the things darwin says in his dispute with wallace are quite stupid actually for example wallace said look female birds are mottled brown and
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
because they want protection on the nest. They don't use the word camouflage because it hasn't been coined yet, but that's what they mean. And the reason I know that is because female birds that breed in holes are often quite brightly colored, things like parrots or kingfishers or woodpeckers. And Darwin says, no, no, no, no. I don't believe that females are camouflaged. And you think, why not?
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
And it's because he's desperate not to give an inch on the idea that sexual selection is driving bird color.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
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.
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#923 - Matt Ridley - Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival
Birds are a bit more like us than many mammals. They like song, they like color, they like visual things. We've got pretty good color vision for mammals. Most mammals have only got two color channels. We've got three, as have other primates. So we see a much more colorful world, rather like the world the birds see, not nearly as colorful as they see. They've got at least four channels.