Matt Ridley is a science writer, journalist, and author. Evolution is a strange theory. If survival is all that matters, why do we find things beautiful? Why does beauty exist at all? And if aesthetics are so important, how do some species thrive without it? Expect to learn what Darwin’s strangest ideas were, the fundamental mystery of sexual selection, why females choose certain males based on beauty and performance rather than obvious survival traits, if females actually have as much agency in mate selection as we assume, or if other forces dictate choice, the alternative explanations for beauty and why aesthetics are so important and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What was Darwin's strangest idea?
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.
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.
I call it the fun version of evolution because it produces loud songs and things like that. It's less utilitarian.
Yeah. What was the reaction when Darwin first proposed sexual selection?
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.
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. 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.
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.
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Chapter 2: Why was Darwin's theory of sexual selection initially ridiculed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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