The Meme Machine

124 THE MEME MACHINE
kind of behaviour that served, in the past, to get our genes into the next
generation, and will go on doing so in the future.
We should not underestimate how successful sociobiology has been in
addressing this central topic, nor how hard a fight it initially had for acceptance.
For many decades the popular view was that human beings were somehow
above nature and not subject to the constraints of genes and biology. In sexual
behaviour, it was thought, we alone could transcend ‘mere’ biology and make
rational conscious choices about whom we made love to and how. Even though
nothing is closer to the propagation of genes than sexual behaviour, the theories
of the 1950s and 1960s completely ignored biological facts. They made culture
the overriding force but, unlike memetics, had no Darwinian account of how
culture could exert such a force. With the advent of sociobiology in the 1970s
we could begin to make sense of some of our peculiar sexual proclivities (see
e.g. Matt Ridley 1993; Symons 1979).
Love, beauty, and parental investment
Consider mate choice. We may like to think that we chose our lover for reasons
that have nothing to do with genes and biology; maybe we just fell in love,
maybe we chose rationally because he fitted our notion of a perfect husband, or
maybe we chose for aesthetic reasons because – well, because he’s gorgeous.
The truth appears to be that romance and falling in love are themselves based on
our deep-seated tendencies to pick sexual partners in ways that would, in our far
past, have enhanced the chances of passing our genes into the next generation.
For a start, just how attractive is your partner? I could make a guess that he
or she will be just about as attractive as you are. Why? The logic of what is
called ‘assortative mating’ is very simple, whether you are male or female you
need to get the best mate you possibly can, Inasmuch as beauty is relevant to
what is ‘best’ you will go for the most beautiful partner you can get. But then so
will everyone else. The result should be, on the average, that people pair up
with partners that more or less match them in attractiveness, and this is just what
has been found in experiments.
But what is beauty? What makes a man or a woman attractive? The simple
answer seems to be that men tend women attractive when they have all the signs
of being young and fertile, while women are more interested in the status of a
potential lover than in his physical appearance. This turns out to have a good
biological basis – if a rather complex one.
The basic difference between being male and being female is that females