Monday

The Anti-Dawkins: Are We Hardwired to be 'Selfish' or 'Social'? (Part 3 of 3)

But Roughgarden's not alone in her critiques.

In The Genial Gene, she cites a Japanese study that casts doubt on 'the ultimate poster child of sexual selection': the peacock.

Darwin thought that the only reason peacocks would risk attracting predators with their plumage was because they must be even more desperate to attract mates.

For their part, peahens supposedly judge the quality of males' genes by the beauty of their tail feathers.

After more than seven years of studying peafowl, however, the authors of the Japanese study came to a stunning conclusion: there was no evidence that peahens had any preference for peacocks with fancier trains.

Even more damningly, they noted that other studies also had mixed results.

As Roughgarden puts it, 'those in the UK generally support the sexual-selection narrative, while those elsewhere do not… raising suspicion of publication bias.'

Roughgarden's own work makes you wonder whether the tooth-and-claw view of sex and nature is inherently true or just a 'de-facto truth' because we've been conditioned to believe it.

'How power relates to sex is not a biological universal,' she writes. 'We may choose to live like some species and not others.'

And it could be that sexual selection has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with men conditioned to believe that they have to show off to attract females—'pick-up artists' actually call it 'peacocking' (citing Dawkins).


Meanwhile, women have learned to respond accordingly, rewarding 'alpha males' and 'bad boys' with their affections, even though they might be better off with nice beta and epsilon blokes. Roughgarden takes evident delight in a review that hailed her work as 'a civilization-changer.'

'But I don't think it's being taken seriously enough yet for that engagement to occur,' she says.

'People suppose that it will just go away, that the triumph of the selfish-gene narrative will continue unabated. That's wishful thinking,' she shrugs, 'but it's a kind of euphoria before the crash.'

The beauty of science, though, is that those who shout the loudest aren't necessarily the most revered in the long run.

Around the same time that Darwin was publicizing his newfangled theory, a little-known Austrian was quietly working out the mechanics of evolution.

The scientific community didn't honor Gregor Mendel until after his death.

And for what it's worth, he wasn't an atheist, either.

'The father of modern genetics' was an Augustinian monk.

The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness is published by the University of California Press

J.R. Daeschner is the author of The History of Sex (But Not As We Know It): A Journey from Pompeii’s Oldest Brothel to Cold War Sexpionage, Angry Male Lesbians and Beyond

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