Books do Furnish a Life by Richard Dawkins

Author:Richard Dawkins [Dawkins, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473579491
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2021-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Art, advertisement and attraction

Robin Wight is one of Britain’s more imaginative and creative advertising executives. He has long been fascinated by the analogy between animal and human advertising techniques. I wrote this foreword for his 2007 essay entitled The Peacock’s Tail and the Reputation Reflex: the neuroscience of art sponsorship.

Darwin would have liked this thoughtful essay by Robin Wight. His co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, would have loved it. These two scientific heroes stand at opposite ends of a continuum of opinion, which we can represent as ‘art for art’s sake’ at Darwin’s end of the spectrum, and ‘art repays sponsorship’ at Wallace’s. The specific field of their disagreement was Darwin’s ‘other theory’ of sexual selection, epitomized by the peacock – poster boy of nature’s advertising industry, the Robin Wight of the bird world.

Natural selection, narrowly understood as a drab utilitarian bean-counter obsessed with survival, was always going to have trouble with peacocks and peacock butterflies, with angel fish and birds of paradise, with the song of a nightingale or the antlers of a stag. Darwin realized that individual survival was only a means to the end of reproduction. As we would put it today, it is not peacocks that survive in the evolutionary long run anyway, it is their genes, and genes survive only if they make it into the next generation, manipulating a succession of short-term bodies to that long-term end. For peacocks and other animals whose biggest hurdle in the way of reproduction is competitors of the same sex, natural selection – or sexual selection as Darwin called it in this case – will tend to favour extravagant attractiveness or formidable weaponry, cost what it might in economic resources or risk to individual survival.

Attractiveness in whose eyes? The eyes of the peahen, of course, and if her tastes happen to coincide with ours so much the better for us. The peacock is a walking advertisement, a colourful hoarding, a neon come-hither, an expensive commercial. Even a work of art? Yes, why not? The case is even clearer for the bower birds of Australia and New Guinea. Not particularly bright or showy in their plumage, male bower birds build an ‘external peacock tail’, a labour of love which serves the same purpose of attracting females. Fashioned from grass, twigs and leaves woven into the shape of an arch or a maypole, paved with stones, decorated with berries or painted with their juice, adorned with flowers, shells, coloured feathers from other species of birds, fragments of coloured glass, even beer-bottle tops, no two bowers are the same. Females survey the bowers and then choose the male whose architectural offering they find most pleasing.

Males will spend hours titivating and perfecting their bowers. If an experimenter moves an item while the bird is away, he will carefully replace it when he returns. The trope of the ‘external peacock tail’ is reinforced by a telling observation. Those species of bower bird with the drabbest plumage tend to be the ones with the most elaborate bowers.

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