Sex and mind games

"It is fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen."

~Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

This quote brings up interesting thoughts and could be taken many ways. We have to keep in mind that Darwin did live in the Victorian times, and history has always favored the thoughts of men. We're not called mankind for nothing. If you think about the history of the human race, it's very much men oriented. Women for many centuries were thought to be insipid, simpering ornamentation on a man's arm. But yet, if you look at nature and the effects of natural selection on evolution, especially in mammals, it's the females who usually 'shape' the evolution of males. They do this by selecting for the better trait or the better genes in their mates to pass down to their offsprings. This results in the exaggeration of those traits that have evolved after specific selection over many generations (i.e. the peacock's tail, lion's mane, antlers). Interestingly enough, research done have shown that females pick these traits not because it tickles their fancy, as pretty as that tail might be. But these exaggerated and seemingly useless traits that the males are burdened with could actually be the advertisement that they themselves carry the desired traits that are more fit for survival regardless of the burdensome advertisement. Not to bore anyone with the bio talk, the underlying point is that the genes carried by the male who caught the girl's fancy is actually more desirable and more hardy in survival.

So where does this put human gender evolution? Darwin assumes human females have selected for human males based on mental traits. This is sort of a contradiction to the hunter role that males traditionally take on. So in a way, according to Darwin, human intelligence has evolved due to male's conniving ability to convince females of their fitness rather than having natural selection naturally carry out it's role in selecting for the best adaptability to the environment. Darwin was seeing it as unfortunate that man have not evolved through sexual selection to possess the differential 'beauty' of peacocks since genetically, 'smart' men will have smart if not smarter daughters.