EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial by Marc Hauser Read Free Book Online Page A

males compete with each other for access to females — the most valuable and limited resource — and why females are picky, expressing an aesthetic preference for males of a particular quality. Selection favors parts of the body and brain associated with dominant males and picky females. Dominant males win fights against other males, and thus gain greater access to females. Dominant males take risks and are more aggressive. Picky females hold out for the best males, those who provide the most desirable resources. Picky females are patient, waiting for males with good genes, access to prime real estate, and the protective skills and motivation to defend them and their young. These are qualities linked to high status. These are qualities associated with the ability to obtain and control resources. These are the qualities that females desire and are motivated to obtain.
    What these basic evolutionary processes lead to is a tango of desires, a topic that will occupy us in chapter 3 . For now, the key point is that across all socially living animals, study after study supports the conclusion that male desire for dominance swings with female desire for dominant males. This dance leads males to evolve ever more powerful means of winning, and pushes females to be ever more discriminating and demanding in terms of a male’s qualifications as a mate 15 .
    Given the push for increasing means of winning and discriminating, there is a premium on social information. Information about a competitor’s weakness or the quality of a mate, provides an upper hand in fighting and reproducing. The neuroscientist Michael Platt carried out a clever series of experiments with male rhesus monkeys to explore how much individuals would pay to gain access to socially relevant information. To set the stage, keep in mind that rhesus monkeys are a hyper-aggressive species with a strict dominance hierarchy: high ranking individuals outcompete lower ranking individuals for food, places to rest, and mates. If someone tries to step out of line, and gets caught, the costs can be extreme. In the heat of the mating season on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, I have witnessed high ranking male rhesus monkeys pin down lower ranking males trying to sneak a mating, rip into their groin with knife-like canines, and extract one testicle. Hyper-aggressive, competitive, and costly for the loser.
    In Platt’s experiment, each monkey watched a slide show with viewing options akin to pay-per-view television. On a given trial, they could watch one of two images for as long as they liked, each viewing option associated with a particular amount of juice. For each pair of images, one delivered more juice than the other. Given that these monkeys were thirsty, they should prefer more juice over less juice. If monkeys have no interest in the images per se — because they have no value — then their viewing preferences should be strictly determined by where they can get the most juice. If, on the other hand, the images have value, and some images are more valuable than others, then they may be willing to look at an image that delivers less juice over an image that delivers more. This is paying for viewing, and a proxy for their motivation and desire for juice. Evidence that rhesus monkeys value the social information that comes from the image over the juice itself would be a surprising result given that juice is a primary reward whereas the image is only a secondary reward — an indication or cue of things to come.
    Consistently, these male monkeys had two favorite channels, preferring those showing pictures of high ranking individuals and close-ups of female derrieres. They preferred these over images of low ranking individuals, despite the fact that their preferred choice often cost them the opportunity to drink more juice.
    Platt’s findings show that rhesus monkeys are motivated to acquire information about socially relevant situations, including information about