The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think Read Online Free PDF Page B

financiers in a deal that could have turned out quite badly.In fact, not all of Joe Kennedy’s risks paid off.A few years before pulling off his famous $650,000 Wall Street win, he lost most of his assets by following a bad tip on a stock that later plunged to half its value.And while he was a student at Harvard, he took other risks as well.Despite the antialcohol laws, Kennedy supplied plentiful booze at parties.And his liquor business continued to flow during Prohibition, leading later commentators to speculate that he had some shady connections with the underworld.(Mobster Frank Costello claimed to have done business with Joe Kennedy before the Irishman moved on to more legitimate enterprises.)
    Joe Kennedy took chances in the sexual department as well.He had affairs with many women, not just Hollywood starlet Gloria Swanson, despite his prominence in Boston’s Roman Catholic establishment.Joe’s descendants were notorious for risky decisions when it came to women and sex.JFK infamously used his Secret Service agents to cover for him when he snuck beautiful women into the White House.And to make bad judgment worse, one of the president’s mistresses was a friend of Mafia don Sam Giancana—a fact Republicans later leaked to the press.Later, Joe’s grandson Michael Kennedy narrowly avoided going to jail for statutory rape after an affair with a teenage babysitter, and another Kennedy grandchild, William Kennedy Smith, was accused of sexual assault by several different women and prosecuted for rape in one case.And what was Teddy, a married man, doing in that car with Mary Jo Kopechne in the first place?
    What does all this risky behavior have to do with evolutionary biology?A lot, it turns out.Beneath the surface of seemingly ill-advised choices is a deeper link between men’s risk taking and reproductive success.Women in societies all around the world are attracted to ambitious men who are willing to take risks to become successful (we’ll talk more about women’s psychology in Chapter 8 , “Sexual Economics: His and Hers”).
    This doesn’t mean that a man’s risky choice will always lead to reproductive success.Risk, after all, is inherently risky.But the link between risk and mating does suggest that men are not likely to take risks haphazardly.Instead, men should be prone to making riskier choices specifically when their behavior could lead to a reproductive opportunity.To see how this works, let’s go Down Under.
    At a skateboard park in Queensland, Australia, psychologists Richard Ronay and William von Hippel offered ninety-six young male skaters $20 to perform two tricks on their speedy little land-surfing devices.The researchers asked skaters to choose one easy trick and a more difficult stunt they were working on but could only complete successfully about half the time.A male researcher filmed the skateboarders as they practiced their two tricks.Midway through filming, though, a highly attractive eighteen-year-old female strutted onto the scene.To verify that young blokes found her good-looking, the researchersasked twenty other guys to rate her attractiveness.Not only did she score as a knockout, but the ratings were, as the researchers noted, “corroborated by many informal comments and phone number requests from the skateboarders.”
    With the attractive young woman looking on, each skateboarder demonstrated his tricks a few more times, then donated a sample of saliva to the researchers, who later analyzed it for the amount of the hormone testosterone.
    The researchers found that the beautiful woman caused the young skaters to throw caution to the wind.Taking more chances led to a lot more crash landings, but it also led to more successes on the difficult tricks—the kind of daring stunts that a young woman who enjoys the punk musical stylings of the Dead Kennedys might find impressive.But this boost in riskiness was accompanied by two additional findings that reveal something deeper about the