With at least eight theories in the running, we can hardly claim to understand why people from sunny climates have dark skins. That in rtself does not refute the idea that, somehow, natural selection caused the evolution of dark skins in sunny climates. After all, dark skins could have multiple advantages, which scientists may sort out some day. Instead, the heaviest objection to any theory based on natural selection is that the association between dark skins and sunny climates is a very imperfect one. Native peoples had very dark skins in some areas receiving relatively little sunlight, like Tasmania, while skin colour is only medium in sunny areas of tropical Southeast Asia. No American Indians have black skins, not even in the sunniest parts of the New World. When one takes cloud cover into account, the world's most dimly lit areas, receiving a daily average of under three-and-a-half hours of sunlight, include parts of equatorial West Africa, southern China, and Scandinavia, inhabited respectively by some of the world's blackest, yellowest, and palest peoples! Among the Solomon Islands, all of which share a similar climate, jet-black people and lighter people replace each other over short distances. Evidently, sunlight has not been the sole selective factor that moulded skin colour.
The first response of anthropologists to these objections is to raise a counter-objection, the time factor. This argument tries to explain away the cases of pale-skinned people in the tropics by claiming that those particular peoples migrated to the tropics too recently to have evolved black skins. For example, the ancestors of American Indians may have reached the New World only 11,000 years ago (Chapter Eighteen): perhaps that has not been long enough to evolve black skins in the tropical Americas. But if you are going to evoke the time factor to explain away objections to the climate theory of skin colour, then you also have to consider the time factor for peoples who supposedly support that theory. One of the prime supports of the climate theory is the pale skin of Scandinavians, living in the cold, dark, foggy North. Unfortunately, Scandinavians have been in Scandinavia for an even shorter time than American Indians have been in the Amazon. Until about 9,000 years ago, Scandinavia was covered by an ice-sheet and could hardly have supported any people, pale-skinned or dark-skinned. Modern Scandinavians reached Scandinavia only around 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, as a result of the expansion of farmers from the Near East (Chapter Ten) and of Indo-European speakers from southern Russia (Chapter Fifteen). Either Scandinavians acquired their pale skins long ago in some other area with a different climate, or else they acquired them in Scandinavia within half the time that Indians have spent in the Amazon without becoming dark-skinned.
The sole people in the world about whom we can be certain that they spent the last 10,000 years in the same location were the natives of Tasmania. Lying south of Australia, at the temperate latitude of Chicago or Vladivostok, Tasmania used to be connected to Australia until it was cut off by rising sea levels 10,000 years ago and became an island. Since modern Tasmanian natives did not have boats capable of going more than a few miles, we know that they were derived from colonists who walked out to Tasmania at the time of its connection to Australia, and who remained there continuously until they were exterminated by British colonists in the Nineteenth Century (Chapter Sixteen). If any people had enough time for natural selection to match their skin colour to their local temperate-zone climate, it was the Tasmanians. Yet they had blackish skins, supposedly adapted to the Equator.
If the case for natural selection of skin colour seems weak, that for hair colour and eye colour is virtually non-existent. There are no consistent correlations with climate, and not even any half-plausible theories for the supposed advantage lent by each colour type. Blonde hair is common in cold, wet, dimly lit Scandinavia and also among Aborigines of the hot, dry, sunny desert of central Australia. What do those two areas have in common, and how does being blonde help both Swedes and Aborigines to survive? Do freckles and red hair help Irishmen catch leprechauns? Blue eyes are common in Scandinavia and supposedly help their owners see farther in dim, misty light, but that speculation is unproven, and all my friends in the even dimmer, mistier mountains of New Guinea see just fine with their dark eyes.
The racial traits for which it seems most absurd to seek an explanation based on natural selection are our variable genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. Are hemispherical breasts an adaptation to summer rainfall and conical breasts an adaptation to winter fog, or vice versa? Do the protruding labia minora of Bushmen women protect them against pursuing lions, or reduce their water losses in the Kalahari Desert? You surely don't think that men with hairy chests can thereby keep warm while going shirtless in the Arctic, do you? If you do think so, then please explain why women do not share hairy chests with men, since women also have to keep warm. Facts such as these were what made Darwin despair of imputing human racial variation to his own concept of natural selection. He finally Qismissed the attempt with a succinct statement: 'Not one of the external differences between the races of man are of any direct or special service to him. When Darwin came up with a theory that he preferred, he termed it sexual selection' to contrast with natural selection, and he devoted an entire book to explaining it. The basic notion behind this theory is easily grasped. Darwin noted many animal features that had no obvious survival value but that did play an obvious role in securing mates, either by attracting an individual of the opposite sex or by intimidating a rival of the same sex. Familiar examples are the tails of male peacocks, the manes of male lions, and the bright red buttocks of female baboons in oestrus. If an individual male is especially successful at attracting females or intimidating rival males, that male will leave more descendants and will tend to pass on his genes and traits—as a result of sexual selection, not natural selection. The same argument applies to female traits as well.
For sexual selection to work, evolution must produce two changes simultaneously: one sex must evolve some trait, and the other sex must evolve in tandem a liking for that trait. Female baboons could hardly afford to flash red buttocks if the sight revolted male baboons to the point of their becoming impotent. As long as the female has it and the male likes it, sexual selection could lead to any arbitrary trait, just as long as it does not impair survival too much. In fact, many traits produced by sexual selection do seem quite arbitrary. A visitor from outer space who had yet to see humans could have no way of predicting that men rather than women would have beards, that the beards would be on the face rather than above the navel, and that women would not have red and blue buttocks.
That sexual selection really can work, at least in birds, was proved by an elegant experiment carried out by the Swedish biologist Make Andersson on the long-tailed widowbird of Africa. In this species the male's tail in the breeding season grows to 20 inches long, while the female's tail is only 3 inches. Some males are polygamous and acquire up to six mates, at the expense of other males who get none. Biologists had guessed that a long tail served as an arbitrary signal by which males attracted females to join their harem. Andersson's test was to cut off part of the tail from nine males until their tails were only 6 inches long. He then glued those cut segments to the tails of nine other males to give them 30-inch tails, and he waited to see where the females built their nests. It turned out that the males with the artificially lengthened tails attracted on the average over four times as many mates as the males with artificially shortened tails. Perhaps our first reaction to Andersson's experiment is: those dumb birds! Imagine a female selecting a particular male to father her offspring merely because his tail is longer than other males' tails! But before we get too smug, let's consider again what we learned in the last chapter about how we humans select our own mates. Are our criteria such good indicators of genetic worth? Do not some men and women set disproportionate value on the size or form of certain body parts, which are really nothing more than arbitrary signals for sexual selection? Why did we evolve to pay any attention at all to a beautiful face, which is useless to its owner in the struggle for survival?