Monkeyluv
From Robert M. Sapolsky's Monkeyluv
"In recent decades, a revolution has taken place in primatology. It had been thought that sexual behavior among Old World primates (the kinds that live in big social groups, like baboons or macaques) followed a "linear access" model: if a single female was in heat, the highest-ranking male would claim her. And if two females were in heat, males number one and two would mate with them, and so on. The mating patterns were assumed to arise exclusively from the outcome of male-male competition; the females passively wound up with whomever the competition allotted them.
The revolution was the discovery of "female choice," the wildly radical notion that females had some say in the matter. Maybe this had something to do with there having been a transition, such that the best primatologists around were female, and with their looking at the behavior of their animals without that linear-access bias. What was obvious was that some females didn't just passively wind up mating with whichever hunk strutted forward. Being half the size of males in many of these species, females couldn't convince a male they didn't favor to get lost by beating on him.
But they sure could fail to cooperate. Maybe a female wouldn't stand still when the male tried to mate. Maybe, when pursued by a male, she would repeatedly walk right past the male's worst rival, forcing the two into tense interactions. And with any luck, those two male rivals would get so haired out with each other that they would collapse into fighting, giving the female the opportunity to sneak off to the bushes and mate with the guy she is really interested in (a phenomenon called stolen copulations, as well as other, unprintable terms, by primatologists).
But if the female has a choice, who does she choose? Who does attract her to the bushes? The answer, at least among baboons, is stunning: the nice guy. Maybe it is a male with whom she has a "friendship," or a mutual grooming relationship. Maybe he carries her kid to safety when predators are around. Maybe he is the father of that kid. But basically, he is a male who is now favored because of the quality of the relationship he has worked out with her over time - not because he has won some fight with another male.
Let's be clear about what's happening. This is not the case of a female thinking, in effect, Okay, that big hunk over there in the biker jacket is really hot, but be sensible, kiddo, the guy's trouble, better stick with kindly Alan Alda. Just the opposite. These females are manipulating these big, dangerous studs into fighting with each other, are risking life and limb (as they are occasionally subject to fatal displacement aggression at the teeth of those frustrated males), all to sneak off to the bushes to have sex with the Alan Aldas of their society. Think about it: nice can be proximally sexy.
This is extraordinary. And even more extraordinary, genetic studies of paternity have shown that in some species, male primates who bypass overt male-male competition and instead covertly copulate in the bushes do pretty well for themselves in the task of passing on copies of their genes. By the coldly calculating bottom line of evolution, this niceness business is not just some foolish sentimentality; it's a successful strategy.
So let your average, callow primate get all crazed and libidinous over how someone looks or smells. For the monkey who actually cares about how he treats someone, the evolutionary payoff is at least as great. This is pleasing news on a proximal level: even for a nonhuman primate, the most erogenous organ can be the mind. Or the heart. And this is pleasing news on an ultimate level as well, for all of us who have been tempted to jettison our kindergarten lessons about being nice and sharing in favor of sad adult jadedness about looking out for number one. Maybe that notoriously asymmetric sage Leo Durocher was wrong with that business about nice guys finishing last."