Today Ryan teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and is a senior research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Decades of studying sexual selection have led him to develop a theory called sensory exploitation. “The key idea is simple: Features of the female’s brain that find certain notes of the males’ mating call attractive existed long before those attractive notes evolved,” he writes. A central aspect of his theory is animals harbor hidden sexual preferences that influence the evolution of sexual traits. In “The Mate Selection Trapdoor” in this week’s Nautilus, Ryan spells out the adaptive benefits of hidden preferences. [...]
The view long has long been that males, in their sexual communication, are saying something important about themselves, and it’s up to the females to figure out what that is, to figure out which males are truly attractive and which are not. I argue the other side of the coin. Females aren’t trying to figure out what males are saying. When they mate with a male, by definition, that male is attractive. So females are the deciders. Over evolutionary time, it seems males are trying out a lot of different courtship traits. A bright orange here, a bright blue there, rub your wings together and make a sound, or jump up and do a dance. They are trying to do these things to tickle females’ preferences. But it’s really the females calling the shots. It’s the female’s brain that sets the bar for what kind of traits are attractive and unattractive. [...]
Well, there are idiosyncrasies, for sure, with females. With bowerbirds, females are attracted by all of the ornaments the male displays around the bower. What scientists have shown is that younger females seem to be more swayed by the decorations of the bower than they are by the males themselves. And older females are more impressed by the display of the male than the decorations of the bower. Scientists have shown, in swordtail fishes, that the preference for the male’s sword seems to change with the age of the female, or the size of the female. [...]
It’s taught me it’s hard to know why women prefer certain traits in males. The brain is our most important sex organ, but it has lots of other things on its mind. So it leads you to wonder how the life experiences of women, with things that have nothing to do with sexual beauty, influence what they find as attractive? This isn’t surprising. I’m an academic, so the kinds of folks that I run into in my job have respect for creativity, intelligence, and being articulate. Things that would make a male attractive in this social scenario probably might not add to a male’s attractiveness in other kinds of scenarios.
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