Steve Stewart-Williams

By accident or by design, these crazy meat robots discovered ways to convert more and more of the matter of the Earth’s biosphere into more and more human beings.

most humans believe in invisible beings called “ghosts,” or “spirits,” or “gods.” Many spend vast amounts of time thinking about these beings and attempting to communicate with them telepathically, and many gather together regularly to perform costly and elaborate rituals, aimed at persuading the beings to be nice to them. On top of that, many make strenuous efforts to persuade others to believe in the invisible beings and to engage in the costly rituals. And they do all of this despite a relative paucity of evidence that the invisible beings exist or that the rituals actually work.

The implications of this view of life are astounding. One implication is that all life on Earth is one big, not-so-happy family. A trip to the zoo is literally a family reunion. In fact, even a trip to the fridge is a family reunion of sorts.

Males can only grow a good one if they’re genuinely “rich” – that is, if they’re in good condition, have relatively few mutations, and are relatively immune to the local pathogens and parasites. In effect, males with the most impressive tails are announcing to the world that “I can afford to grow this useless ornament, and can keep myself alive despite having to lug it around. I am therefore a particularly fit and virtuous specimen of manhood.” And that, apparently, is what peahens most want to hear.

Our ancestors didn’t need to enjoy having kids to keep the conveyer belt of human life running. In fact, they didn’t even need to want to have kids in the first place. All they needed was to want to have sex, and then nine months later, to want to look after the crying, cooing aftermath of that sex. Doing so can sometimes deal a body blow to people’s happiness. But natural selection doesn’t “care” about our happiness. It cares about whether we pass on our genes.

Beauty, from a Darwinian vantage point, is a certificate of good health, and courtship a process of shopping around for the best genes for our future offspring. In a sense, mate choice is a form of eugenics, and always has been.