Free Undeniable by Bill Nye

was French, too. She had a certain European flair. And there was another thing: Monique was in her twenties, and wearing a bikini. (I am not skilled enough to have prepared a sketch.) I remember the grown-ups staring at me, because I was staring at her. The thing is, I distinctly remember that I did not know why I was staring at her. Of course looking back, she was, as it is expressed in modern parlance, a total babe. But I did not have the linguistic skills to express that, nor did I feel anything like what I would later feel as a teenager. I was just stuck staring. I take this as incontrovertible evidence that our brains are set up to support or carry out sexual selection, without our even knowing it.
    Sexual selection is the second fundamental idea in Darwin’s theory of evolution, ranking next behind natural selection. Sexual selection is the process by which organisms of the same species select genes to be passed to subsequent generations. It is what drives so much of what so many of the species on Earth do all day, and all night.
    Natural selection in the general sense is the interplay between organisms and their environment. Nowadays, a century after Darwin, we might describe the process as the interplay between organisms and their ecosystem. Slightly better suited organisms outcompete the not-quite-so-well-suited organisms. This happens when random processes produce genes that happen to fit in well with the environment and ecosystem extant at the time. It was Darwin’s greatest insight, and still forms the cornerstone for the modern understanding of what drives evolutionary change.
    But along with the interplay between individual and ecosystem is another interplay between individual and other individuals of the species. They are competing with each other for energy and opportunities that enable them to reproduce. For plants, the fundamental resources are sunlight and nutrients in soil. For little fish, it might be zooplankton, tiny animals in the sea. For big fish, it’s little fish. For you and me, it’s food and water. But from an evolutionary standpoint, no amount of sunlight, fertilizer, nutritious food, or cozy blankets is enough. Organisms have to pass on their genes in order to have successors—in order to keep their genes in the gene pool. To that end, plants and animals go wild.
    There are celebrated passages in The Bible about the lilies of the field. The authors of the Book of Matthew remarked that these beautiful flowers neither toil, nor do they spin yarn to be made into clothes. It’s a passage encouraging the disciples of Jesus not to worry about Earthly things, specifically what exactly they’ll be wearing while they’re out proselytizing.
    Lovely as that passage may be, The Bible missed an important point here about nature and evolution, specifically about sexual selection. In fact lilies, like every other sexual organism on the planet, work pretty hard to produce a means to mate. If you haven’t already, stop and think about how much energy a plant puts into creating a flower. In general, a green plant such as a lily, rose, hickory tree, Ponderosa pine, or bull kelp, has leaves, needles, or fronds to collect sunlight. And in general, the other structures such as stems, trunks, or stipe serve to support the leaves in an efficient or efficient-enough fashion. What else does a plant do besides look to soak up light? The answer is simply: make more plants, which is not easy.
    Plants go to great lengths to reproduce. It takes a lot of a lily’s energy to produce flowers. It takes a great deal out of an oak tree to make thousands of acorns. In that case, the tree is, in turn, counting on squirrels to forget where they hid a few acorns, so that a new oak tree might grow nearby. Apple trees and orange trees go to all kinds of trouble to grow fruit, so that some guy like me or my local Los Angeles “citrus mice” (rats) will wander off with a piece and spit out