Free The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller Page B

surplus of strength, vitality, and growth-power which is able to expend itself in this
way without injury." Males become even more worked up in the
mating season, which he thought explains why their ornaments grow more colorful just at the time when females happen to be
looking at them. The surplus of energy that males build up in the mating season also tends to get released in ardent songs and extravagant dances.
Females, Wallace thought, are under stronger natural selective pressures to remain discreetly camouflaged because they are so often found near their vulnerable offspring. For example, he showed that female birds that brood in open nests have usually evolved dull camouflage, whereas those that brood in enclosed nests tend to have colors as bright as the males of the species. In Wallace's view, this implied that sexual courtship by males—one of the riskiest, most exhausting, most complex activities in the animal world—must be the default state of the organism, and that the camouflaged laziness shown by young animals, female animals, and males outside the breeding season is something maintained by natural selection. He seems to have envisioned all organic tissue as bursting with color, form, song, dance, and self-expression, which the prim headmistress of natural selection must keep under control.
Wallace understood camouflage and warning coloration. He knew that the perceptual abilities of predators could influence the evolution of prey appearance. So why was he so hostile to female choice, in which the perceptual abilities of females influence the evolution of male appearance? He seems to have forgotten that half of all predators are female. If a female predator can choose to avoid prey that have bright warning colors, why should she be unable to choose a sexual partner based on his bright ornamentation?
Moreover, Wallace's alternative to mate choice begged important questions. Why would males automatically be stronger and more vital than females? Why would they waste surplus energy in such displays? Wallace's arguments along these lines were implausible, ad hoc, and untested. Yet many Victorian biologists considered them at least as plausible as Darwin's mate choice theory. Even more strangely, Wallace's energy-surplus idea foreshadowed Freud's speculation that human artistic display results from a sublimation of excess sexual energy. They also foreshadowed Stephen Jay Gould's claim, first sketched out in his 1977 book Ontogeny and Phytogeny, that human creative intelligence is a side-effect of surplus brain size. However, these energy-surplus
arguments make little evolutionary sense. In most species surplus energy is converted into fat, not creativity. Surplus brain-mass that yielded no survival or reproductive advantages would quickly be eliminated by selection.
If Darwin had found that male animals choose female mates selectively and that many females are highly ornamented to attract male attention, would Wallace and his contemporaries have been so skeptical about sexual choice? I think not. For male Victorian scientists, it was taken for granted that young single ladies should wear brilliant dresses and jewels to attract the attention of eligible bachelors. Male scientists had direct personal insight into male mate choice. They might easily have sympathized with male animals had Darwin credited them with powers of sexual discernment. They did sympathize with male animals engaged in violent contests with other males for the "possession" of females, which is presumably why they were able to accept Darwin's theory that male weaponry evolved for sexual competition. They simply did not like to think of males as sexual objects accepted or rejected by female choice. (This point is often overlooked by Darwin's feminist critics, who unfairly portray him as embodying Victorian social attitudes.)
The rejection of Darwin's female choice theory was, I think, due to ideological biases in 19th-century natural history,