Mutants (39 page)

G
ROUP OF
S
ELK
’
NAM
, T
IERRA DEL
F
UEGO C
.1914

There is one more thing I should like to know about. And it is a phenomenon more general and nearly as contentious as race. It is beauty. Beauty is that which we see (or hear or touch or smell) that gives us pleasure, and as such its forms are, or at least seem to be, infinitely various. Here I am concerned with physical beauty alone.

‘Beauty,’ says the philosopher Elaine Scarry, ‘prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees something beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce it.’ Plato, she points out, had the same idea. In
The symposium
, Socrates tells how he was instructed in the arts of love by Diotima, a woman of Mantinea, and how they spoke of the nature of love and beauty. ‘I will put it more plainly,’ says Diotima. ‘The object of love, Socrates, is not what you think, beauty.’ ‘What is it then?’ ‘Its object is to procreate and bring forth beauty.’ ‘Really?’ ‘It is so, I assure you.’

Darwin could not have put it better himself. Much of his
The descent of man and selection in relation to sex
is devoted to investigating the presence, perception and purpose of beauty. ‘The most refined beauty,’ he wrote, ‘may serve as a charm for the female, and for no other purpose.’ He was thinking of the tail feathers of the male Argus pheasant with its geometrical arrays of ocelli. But the psychologies of pheasants and Fijians are really much the same. For Darwin, the love of beauty is a very general evolutionary force, second only to natural selection itself in power. Creatures choosing beauty for generation upon generation have given the natural world much of its exuberance. Sexual selection has given the Madagascar chameleon its horns; it has given the swordtail fish its sword and Birds of Paradise and Argus pheasants their tails; it has given the human species its variety.

One of the fascinating things about Darwin’s account of beauty is that without reference to philosophers or artists he stakes out a position on the great issues of aesthetics. He wants to know whether or not beauty is universal or particular, whether it is common or rare, and whether or not it has meaning. To all of these questions Darwin has an unequivocal answer. Physical beauty, he asserts, is not universal, but rather particular. Different people in different parts of the world each have their own standard of beauty. And it is rare. To be beautiful is to be a little different from everyone else around us. It is also meaningless. Our brains, for whatever reason, perceive some things as beautiful, and do so regardless of the other qualities that those things may have. Beauty does not signify anything. It exists for its own sake.

Darwin’s views on beauty are characteristically, effortlessly, original.
The descent of man
contains nothing, for example, about the classical ideal of beauty – the ideal that, from Archaic kouros to Antinous’ scowl, was replicated across the Mediterranean for centuries as if there were a formula for it; which there was, one that by the Renaissance had become a theory of human beauty in which proportions were divine, a theory that in the eighteenth century turned into the standard by which all humanity was judged. It was this ideal that caused Winckelmann to assert that the ancient Greeks were the most beautiful of all people (though he thought modern Neapolitans comely as well); that caused Camper to place the head of a Greek statue at one end of his continuum of facial angles; Buffon to identify a ‘beauty zone’ between 20 and 35 degrees north that stretched from the Ganges to Morocco and took in the Persians, Turks, Circassians, Greeks and Europeans; and Bougainville, when he arrived in Tahiti in 1768, to eulogise its inhabitants in terms of a classical idyll painted by Watteau. Darwin avoids all this. He does not tell us what he thinks is beautiful; instead he attempts to find out what other people think. He collects travellers’ reports. American Indians, he is told, believe that female beauty consists of a broad, flat face, small eyes, high cheekbones, a low forehead, a broad chin, a hook nose and breasts hanging down to the belt. Manchu Chinese prefer women with enormous ears. In Cochin China, beauties have round heads; in Siam, they have divergent nostrils; Hottentots like their women so immensely steatopygous that, having sat down, they cannot stand up again.

Darwin does wonder about the quality of his data – and
rightly so. But in general he is quite convinced that different people perceive beauty in different ways. His vision is an appealing one.
Per molto variare la natur è bella
– nature’s beauty is its variety; it could be Darwin’s slogan and it could be Benetton’s (though it was Elizabeth I’s). Indeed, when we consider the whirlwind of fashion it is impossible to doubt that the love of beauty is frequently the particular love of rare and meaningless things. Among scientists who study beauty, however – and the study of beauty is itself increasingly fashionable – Darwin’s views are seen as rather quaint. These days, most research on the subject begins with the notions that the standard of beauty is universal, that the presence of beauty is rather common, and that far from being meaningless, it has a great deal to say.

The universality of beauty’s standard is as self-evident as its particularity. The apparent contradiction is resolved if we simply recognise that there are some things about which tastes differ, and some about which they do not. Tastes in hairiness (cranial, facial, bodily), pigmentation (eye, hair and skin colour) and perhaps even body shape (hip–waist ratio) all seem to differ quite a lot from person to person, place to place, time to time. But the taste for relative youth – at least when men judge women – does not. Nor, it seems, does the taste for certain kinds of faces. Average faces seem to be universally more attractive than most, but not all, variant faces. Symmetry is preferred over asymmetry. These are some of the results of a large literature devoted to finding out who finds what beautiful when. Much of it demonstrates the obvious. After all, were a Papua New Guinea tribesman brought to London’s National
Gallery and offered the choice of Botticelli’s Venus (she of
Mars and Venus
) and Massys’s
Grotesque Old Woman
as a mate, he might well be unimpressed by either, but we can be sure which one he’d choose.

Beauty’s meaning is more controversial. Here I wish to pursue just one idea: that it has something to do with physiological condition; that it is, indeed, a certificate of health. In its simplest form the truth of this idea is also quite self-evident. Clear skin, bright eyes and white teeth are manifestly signs of beauty and health. It is no accident that Brazilian men, glimpsing a beautiful carioca, sigh ‘
Que saúde’
– what health. Whether particular facial proportions and symmetry signify health is, however, less obvious. Studies using computer-generated faces show that we perceive beautiful faces as being healthy ones. But searches for a correlation between the beauty and health of real people have found only weak and inconsistent effects.

Perhaps this is because beauty is no longer what it was. For all of human history, poor health has mostly been about nutrition and pathogens – a lack of the first and an excess of the second. Beauty was an indicator of the salubriousness of the environment or else the ability to resist its vicissitudes. To the degree that this is true, then the variance in beauty must be declining in the most developed nations at least, even as its mean increases. Goitres and cretinism may still afflict large parts of the world, but they no longer afflict the Swiss. The scars of smallpox have disappeared everywhere. Even in England most people now keep their teeth until they die. One wonders whether the diseases – filariasis, malaria, sleeping sickness, not to mention
nutritional deprivation in its many forms – that afflict so many of the world’s children can be read in the symmetry and proportions of their faces if, as adults, they should have survived them. There is no doubt that prosperity exacts a cost to beauty in the form of obesity, dental cavities and stress. But if the balance of its effects is favourable, and it must be, then any classroom of American or European undergraduates contains an abundance of beauty that has never existed in human history before.

That may seem implausible, but only because we have little grasp of beauty’s advance. Beauty is like wealth. It increases over time, yet its distribution remains unequal. However much of it we have, it always seems that someone else has more. In part this is because beauty, as the consequence of health, is also the consequence of wealth. But suppose there existed a society so wealthy and egalitarian that, as far as pathogens and nutrition are concerned, all were equally healthy. A society of the sort approached by the Netherlands (but from which Great Britain and the United States remain woefully distant), in which the socioeconomic background of a child cannot be judged from his or her physical appearance alone. Would all be equally beautiful in such a society? Would beauty’s difference have disappeared? I doubt it. However beautiful the average Dutchman may believe himself to be, some of his compatriots will be more beautiful yet. I suspect that there is a residual variance in beauty that even the most controlled upbringing cannot eradicate. A residuum that lies in our genes.

The effects of poor childhood nutrition and exposure to pathogens upon the face may be uncertain, but the effects of
mutations are not. When clinical geneticists attempt to classify the symptoms that their patients present, it is to the face that they first look. They are expert in recognising the subtleties that are often the only outward sign of deeper disturbances in the genetic order: shallow philtrum, low-set ears, upturned nose, narrow or wide-set eyes. Many, perhaps most, of the disorders that I have discussed in this book – from achondroplasia to pycnodysostosis – can be read in the face.

It seems that our faces are very vulnerable to mutation. Or perhaps we are just very good at reading mutation’s effects in them. Either way, it seems likely that mutation’s effects are written on all of our faces – not simply the faces of people with identified clinical disorders. I began this book by observing that every newly conceived embryo has, at an educated guess, an average of three hundred mutations that affect its health for the worse. It may seem impossible that we could, as a species, be so poorly. But a certain number of mutations are eliminated by selection in the womb. A woman who knows that she is pregnant has a 15 per cent chance of miscarriage; many more embryos must be lost to women who are unaware that they have conceived. More than 70 per cent of spontaneously aborted foetuses bear severe chromosomal abnormalities, and it is likely that many also bear mutations in particular genes. It is now widely supposed that miscarriage is an evolved device that enables mothers to screen for, and rid themselves of, genetically impaired progeny.

Mutation is a game of chance, one we must all play, and at which we all lose. But some of us lose more heavily than others.
Some calculations hint at the distribution of our losses. If we suppose that, of the three hundred mutations that burden the average newly conceived embryo, five are lost from the population each generation by death (miscarriage, infant and childhood mortality), then the average adult carries 295 deleterious mutations. The least burdened 1 per cent of the population will have about 250 mutations, and the most burdened 342. Somewhere in the world there is a person who has the fewest mutations of all, about 191 of them.

These calculations confirm the intuition that no one leaves the genetic casino unscathed. But they are just educated guesses. They also take no account of the relative cost of each mutation. They are the equivalent of estimating gambling losses by counting the number of chips surrendered to the house without noting their value. It seems likely that the cost of most mutations is quite small. They give us minor ailments such as bad backs and weak eyes. I suspect that they also give us misaligned teeth, graceless noses and asymmetrical ears. If this is so, then the true meaning of beauty is the relative absence of genetic error.

There is, admittedly, very little evidence for this idea, at least in humans. Evolutionary biologists have long suspected that the peacock’s tail and the red deer’s roar are signals of genetic quality, and have amassed much evidence in the support of this theory, most of it weak. The mutational-load explanation of beauty is however consistent with our intuitions – or prejudices – about the distribution of beauty. If deleterious mutations rob us of beauty, they should do so with particular efficacy if we marry our relatives. Most novel mutations are at least partly
recessive, and inbreeding should accentuate their negative effects as they become homozygous. There is no doubt that consanguinous marriages have a cost: the children of cousins have a 2 to 4 per cent higher incidence of birth defects than those of unrelated individuals. One wonders if such children would be judged less beautiful than their outbred peers as well. Pakistan, where around 60 per cent of marriages are between first cousins, would be a good place to look. Conversely, people of mixed ancestry, such as Brazilians, should show the aesthetic benefits of concealing their recessive mutations –
Que saúde.